JERUSALEM NEWS
NEWS AND INFORMATION
Events, happenings, and Opinions Concerning
Israel, Israelites, Judah, and Everyone Else
Jerusalem News-798
Jerusalem News-798
14 Av 5768 15 August 2008
Contents:
1. Israeli Program to prevent Cholera
in Kenya
2. Israeli Firm Wins Mega Deal for Desalination Plant in Australia
3. Fatah
Torture Turning PA Into Hamas-Like
Police State
4. 'Honor' killing comes to the US
5. JORDAN TIMES 14 Aug.'08:"Danish cartoonist, editor say ready to face
court in Jordan"
1. Israeli Program to prevent Cholera
in Kenya
Unique Israeli Cholera Prevention Program Adopted by Red Cross in Kenya
http://www.afhu.org/choleraprevention_pressrelease.htm
Extract:
Jerusalem, August 13, 2008 - A unique cholera prevention program developed by
students at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has been adopted by the Red Cross
in Kenya.
2. Israeli Firm Wins Mega Deal for
Desalination Plant in Australia
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/127180
by Hana Levi Julian
Extracts:
(IsraelNN.com) Israel's IDE Technologies is accustomed to dealing with difficult
situations; its entire raison d'etre is based on the need to bring forth sweet
water from that which would otherwise be unusable.
The contract, worth more than 100 million euros ($149 million) puts IDE in "a
key position for competing in similar projects in the future," said Felder.
It also establishes for the company, owned jointly by the Israel Corporation
Group subsidiary Israel Chemicals and the Delek Group, a beachhead in Australia
where few water technology firms have gone before.
The project is slated for completion sometime in 2010.
Israeli Technology on an International Scale
IDE has used the same technology in the desalination plants in Ashkelon and
Hadera, each of which produces more than 100 million cubic meters of water per
year, as well as in Cyprus (20 million cubic meters / year) and in Eilat (3.6
million cubic meters / year).
The Israeli firm has become a world leader in water desalination since its
establishment in 1965. It specializes in commercial applications of thermal and
membrane technologies for desalinating and converting sea and brackish water to
drinking and process water.
IDE has more than 385 clients in 40 countries on every continent around the
world, altogether producing more than 1,600,000 cubic meters of water per day.
3.
Fatah
Torture Turning PA Into Hamas-Like
Police State
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/127177
by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
(IsraelNN.com) An escalated Fatah campaign to stamp out opposition in Judea and
Samaria has stoked fears that it is copying the Hamas authority in Gaza and
turning the Palestinian Authority (PA) into a police state.
The tactics, including documented torture, also pose an obstacle to peace,
according to former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky and Arab human rights
activist Bassem Eid. They recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal an article
under the title "There Won't Be Peace Without Democracy."
Natan Sharansky and Arab human rights activist Bassem Eid wrote, 'There Won't Be
Peace Without Democracy.'
The increasing human rights violations and torture by Fatah as well as Hamas
have been ignored by American and western governments that have financed police
training for Fatah, the Associated Press pointed out Wednesday. It cited as
examples of Fatah violence the recent "mistaken arrest" of a professor, who was
beaten so badly that he suffered a concussion, and the use of clubs by PA police
to break up anti-government protests.
"The West is supporting one Palestinian faction over the other. It's all about
politics, not human rights," Bir Zeit University political scientist George
Giacaman told AP. A citizens? rights activist told the news agency, "We have
warned of [the PA] turning into a security regime, and there are indications
that we are heading in that direction."
Sharansky and Eid, in their recent Wall Street Journal op-ed article, wrote that
"the tragic peace process turned to farce" with deadly Fatah-Hamas clashes in
Gaza. They pointed out the irony that it was Israel and not Fatah that worked to
rescue a Fatah-aligned clan and then keep them from returning to Gaza, where
they would be subject to the whims of Hamas.
The writers pointed out that the proponents of the Oslo Accords in the 1990s
argued that a PA democracy, no matter how weak, would enable former PA chairman
Yasser Arafat to vanquish Hamas and bring about peace. "In other words, a peace
process that undermined Palestinian democracy created a 'peace partner' [Fatah]
so hated by its own people that the Israeli Army must now protect them,?
Sharansky and Eid wrote.
"Where is the money that was supposedly spent on reforming the judicial system?
Where is the international outrage as Palestinian leaders drag their own society
further into the abyss?" they asked.
PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has stated that a crackdown on Hamas in Judea and
Samaria is necessary to prevent an overthrow similar to last year's military
coup in Gaza. Hamas has accused Fatah and Israel of collaborating to work
against it.
The United States has spent tens of millions of dollars to build a training camp
in Jericho and teach military skills to Fatah militia forces. Its initial
training was a dismal failure as the well-armed Hamas militia pulverized Fatah
in the militia war leading up to the Hamas takeover in Gaza.
The U.S. has continued to pump money and advisors into training Fatah, which has
deployed hundreds of armed policemen in Jenin and Shechem. Israel has complained
that they do very little to fight terrorism and that the IDF still has to
conduct most of the counterterrorist operations in the areas.
Fatah has reacted by trying to remove all elements of public opposition to its
authority, violently breaking up demonstrations, beating photojournalists and
shutting down opposition media.
The Canadian National Post concluded, "The appalling fact, only fitfully
reported in North America, is that the two major Palestinian factions are
committed to an often murderous conflict?. This week, the third anniversary of
Israel's wildly optimistic and ill-advised withdrawal from [Gaza], the situation
is much as Steven Erlanger described in the New York Times at the second
anniversary last summer: "Rather than a model for a future Palestinian state,
Gaza looks like Somalia: broken and ravenous."
4. 'Honor' killing comes to the US
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/08/10/honor_killing_comes_to_the_us/
Globe Columnist / August 10, 2008
NO ONE knows just how many Muslim girls and women are murdered each year in the
name of family "honor," since their deaths frequently go unreported and
unpunished. The cases that do come to light are ghastly. "Women and young girls
are set ablaze, strangled, shot at, clubbed, stabbed, tortured, axed, or stoned
to death," a United Nations report noted in 2004. "Their bodies are found
mutilated with their throat slit, or they are chopped into pieces and thrown in
a ditch."
The report singled out as especially horrifying the honor killing in Pakistan of
"a 16-year-old girl who was reportedly electrocuted to death after being drugged
with sleeping pills and being tied to a wooden bed with iron chains." Her
offense: marrying a boy from the wrong community. Countless others have lost
their lives for refusing an arranged marriage, wearing Western-style clothing,
having a boyfriend, or even being raped.
Recently, the Saudi human rights activist Wajeha al-Huwaidar wrote a scathing
essay characterizing honor killings as a scourge peculiar to the "Greater Middle
East," with its entrenched culture of misogyny and male supremacy. Her article
was prompted by the lynching of 17-year-old Du'a al-Aswad, a Kurdish girl stoned
to death by a mob of Iraqi men. (The essay has been translated by the Middle
East Media Research Institute, which also provides a link to a gruesome
cellphone video of the lynching.) "From Pakistan and Afghanistan through Iran,
the Middle East, and all the way to Morocco," Huwaidar wrote, "this entire part
of the world [is full of] defeated and dejected men, whose only way to gain some
sort of victory is by beating their women to death."
In the last few months, there have been news reports of a Jordanian man
murdering his daughter "to cleanse the family's honor" after she kept leaving
home without permission; another Jordanian, 22 years old, who gave the same
reason - "family honor" - for killing his pregnant sister; a Saudi woman beaten
and shot by her father after he discovered her having an online correspondence
with a man on Facebook; and two Arab brothers in Israel, who strangled their
sister after learning that she was involved in a romantic relationship.
But while honor killings may be more prevalent in the Middle East, no longer are
they unknown in the West.
In the Atlanta suburb of Jonesboro last month, a Pakistani immigrant allegedly
strangled his 25-year-old daughter with a bungee cord because she was determined
to end her arranged marriage and had gotten involved with a new man. According
to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Sandeela Kanwal's father, Chaudhry Rashid,
"told police he is Muslim and that extramarital affairs and divorce are against
his religion [and] that's why he killed her." In court last week, a detective
quoted Rashid: "God will protect me. God is watching me. I strangled my
daughter."
In Upstate New York a few weeks earlier, Waheed Allah Mohammad, an immigrant
from Afghanistan, was charged with attempted murder after repeatedly stabbing
his 19-year-old sister. The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle reported that
Mohammad was "infuriated because his younger sister was going to clubs, wearing
immodest clothing, and planning to leave her family for a new life in New York
City" - she was a "bad Muslim girl," he told sheriff's investigators.
On New Year's Day in Irving, Texas, the bullet-riddled bodies of the Said
sisters - Sarah, 17, and Amina, 18 - were found in an abandoned taxi. Police
issued an arrest warrant for their father, an Egyptian immigrant named Yaser
Abdel Said, who had reportedly threatened to kill them upon learning that they
had boyfriends. According to the Dallas Morning News, Yaser Said was given to
"gun-waving rants about how Western culture was corrupting the chastity of his
daughters."
While many authorities say that Islamic religious tradition does not sanction
honor killing, it has long been accepted in many Muslim societies all the same.
Perpetrators are typically punished lightly, if at all. In 2003, Jordan's
parliament overwhelmingly defeated a proposal to impose harsher penalties for
honor killings; Islamists objected on the grounds that more severe punishment
would violate religious traditions and damage Jordanian society. It is appalling
that such lethally barbaric attitudes persist anywhere - all the more so now
that the shame of honor killing has made its way here.
Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.
5. JORDAN TIMES 14 Aug.'08:"Danish
cartoonist, editor say ready to face court in Jordan"
By Mohammad Ghazal
http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=40316
EXCERPTS:COPENHAGEN/DENMARK- The cartoonist who drew offensive caricatures
depicting the Prophet Mohammad that sparked worldwide protests and a boycott
campaign of Danish products said recently he was ready to stand trial in
Amman to defend himself.
Kurt Westergaard, whose Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a total
of 12 cartoons in September 2005, said he learnt that he was subpoenaed by
the Amman prosecutor general early June along with several Danish
journalists and editors involved in the republication of the caricatures.
"I would like to go to Amman to stand trial. However, what I fear is that I
am convicted in advance," Westergaard told The Jordan Times in Copenhagen 11
Aug.. The cartoonist said he was not officially notified of the subpoena..
. .
The reaction to the cartoons took several forms including political
statements, peaceful demonstrations and attacks against Danish embassies in
Beirut, Damascus and Tehran and resulted in the death of around 50 people,
mainly in Pakistan and Sudan.
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