Britannia Radio

Palestinian spring for Jordan?

By MUDAR ZAHRAN, JPOST

Jordan’s King Abdullah is worried about the Arab Spring making its way to his doorstep.

Speaking to The Washington Post, King Abdullah of Jordan urged Israel to jump-start peace negotiations with the Palestinians; otherwise, he said, “Israel will have to choose between democracy and apartheid.”

While Israel-bashing by Abdullah is nothing new, this “apartheid alert” from a regime based on apartheid policies against a Palestinian majority is shocking.

Abdullah’s attempts to publicly bash Israel, desperately sponsor born-dead peace talks, and welcome Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal in Amman, all indicate that Abdullah is worried about the Arab Spring making its way to his doorstep.

While Abdullah’s kingdom has been witnessing a much calmer tone of protest, nonetheless, they are regular and could grow into a revolution if the Palestinians join in (which so far they have not).

The Palestinian majority in Jordan have endured decades of...

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Classic Zionism in Migron

Op-ed: Residents of hilltop communities are devoted to Zionist ideal of settling the land

David Ha’ivri, YNET

Before we go off looking to face new challenges in high-tech development or perform acts of kindness toward victims of natural disasters around the world, we need to notice that there is a lot of work waiting for us right here.

Our role as Zionists is still not finished: Our rabbis teach us that “The poor of your own city take priority” (Talmud, Baba Metzia.) Classic Zionist challenges still confront us, as they did in the days of the pioneers. The Sarahs, Daliahs and Rinahs have not finished their task of holding on to the Nachal settlements in the Sinai. They and their children are needed to continue settling the Promised Land – all of it.

Yes, the hilltop settlers in Judea and Samaria are the modern successors of the same settlement movement that Yosef Trumpeldor worked for in Tel Chai, Shlomo Ben Yosef in Rosh Pina and Rabbi Shtamper in Petach Tikva....

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Muslims are persecuting Copts in Egypt again.

By Mary Abdelmassih

(AINA) — National and international rights groups have consistently criticized the recourse to the so-called “reconciliation meetings” — dubbed “Bedouin sittings” — that take place between Copts and Muslim assailant after every attack on Copts. The meetings are conducted under the auspices of state security. Last week a series of meetings were held by radical Muslims to decide on the fate of the Copts in a village in Alexandria, and Muslims insisted that the whole Coptic population of 62 families must be deported because of an unsubstantiated accusation levied against one Coptic man.

Copts in the village of Kobry-el-Sharbat (El-Ameriya), Alexandria, were attacked on January 27 by a mob of 3000 Muslims led by Salafi leaders, who looted and torched homes and shops belonging to Copts. The violence was prompted by allegations made by a Muslim barber named Toemah that a 34-year-old Coptic tailor, Mourad Samy Guirgis, had...

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The Poor Palestinians

By Ted Belman

In case you thought the title was referring to the Palestinians living in Gaza, or even Judea and Samaria, you’d be wrong. From my vantage point, these Palestinians have it pretty good, whether in relation to Palestinians living elsewhere, even in Jordan, or to Arabs generally, living in Egypt or Turkey.

“Palestinian” is a name given to Arabs after the ’67 War, who lived or did live in the area known as Palestine during the Palestine Mandate and afterwards right up to the present and includes their descendants even if such descendants never set foot in the area known as Palestine.

Whereas United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR) has resettled over 10 million refugees since WWII, United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is a relief and human development agency, providing education, health care, social services and emergency aid to 5 million Palestine refugees living in Jordan, Lebanon and...

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Court upholds freedom of expression over human dignity?

Prof Eli Pallak, ISRAEL HAYOM

Last week, Israel’s highest appeals court, the Supreme Court, issued a ruling on the Ilana Dayan case (in which the presenter of an investigative journalism television program appealed a lower court decision compelling her and the network to pay an IDF officer NIS 30,000 in damages for defamation). The case presented the court with a fundamental question on the essence of Israeli democracy.

The case began when Ilana Dayan aired an expose on the accidental death of a 13-year-old girl who entered an IDF compound in Gaza. She was mistaken for a terrorist and shot dead. The officer who shot her, who was acquitted of any wrongdoing by a military court, sued the program for allegedly insinuating that he had acted maliciously.

The case raised the fundamental question which is more important: human dignity or freedom of expression and democracy? Esteemed justices Eliezer Rivlin, Uzi Fogelman and Yitzhak Amit decided that democracy trumps human...

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R2P is a double edged sword

By Ted Belman

In Saving Syria, Irwin Cotler laments in ineffectiveness of the UN is coming to grips with Assad’s slaughter of his people.

By REUTERS

Cotler, being a humanitarian and a leading human rights lawyer, values the the notion of Responsibility to Protect known as R2P. He writes

In particular, it was hoped that the UN Security Council would finally, however belatedly, invoke the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine with respect to Syria, as it had with Libya – and with no less compelling justification.


At the UN World Summit in 2005, more than 150 heads of state and government unanimously adopted a declaration on the Responsibility to Protect, authorizing international collective action “to protect [a state’s] population from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity” if that state is unable or unwilling to protect its citizens, or worse, as in the case of Syria, if that state is the author of such criminality.

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Subterranean horror and hope

At the age of 7, in 1943, Krystyna Chiger descended with her family into the sewers of Lvov to escape the Germans, battling hunger, death and disease. Her story has now come to the silver screen, but has ruffled some feathers.

By Ofer Aderet, HAARETZ

In the introduction to his unpublished memoir, “World in Gloom,” Ignacy Chiger wrote: “In the beginning, God created the Heaven and Earth. He settled in Heaven and assigned the Earth to the people. And on the Earth, this happened.”

Almost 70 years have passed, but his daughter, Krystyna, still remembers in detail the 14 months of horror that her family went through in the Holocaust. Between June 1, 1943, and the end of July 1944, she hid with her parents and little brother in the sewers of her hometown, Lvov (then in occupied Poland; today Lviv, Ukraine ). In subhuman conditions, the 7-year-old girl managed to survive rats, putrid water, hunger, disease, depression, terror and death, which stalked her around...

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Israel Healing African Terror Victim

TERRIFIC STORY

Pastor Umar Mulinde was viciously attacked in his home country of Uganda in response to his work as a preacher. Friends from Israel’s JerusalemOnlineU.com jumped in to help, bringing him to Israel for treatment.

Anti-Semitism has become Politically Correct

by Ron Jager, INN

We really shouldn’t be surprised that Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei only recently released a new doctrine explaining why it would be ‘legally and morally justified’ to commit genocide and wipe Israel off the map. “Israel is a cancerous tumor in the Middle East,” Khameini wrote for the ultraconservative Farsi-language Alef news site. “Israel is a satanic media outlet with bombers. Every Muslim is required to arm themselves against Israel.”

In short, despite his public claims that it is the moral obligation of every Muslim to destroy Israel and commit genocide against all Jews, nobody in the international community, none of the leading human rights organizations, not the New York Times nor any other known liberal outlet in the digital world has demanded that the ruling regime in Iran be perceived as an unacceptable apartheid regime harboring and based on explicit Anti-Semitism inherently

illegitimate and...

Its’s called “Nipping it in the bud” or “A stitch in time saves nine”

Krauthammer: Israel ‘will strike’ Iran to ‘prevent a second holocaust’

By Jeff Poor – The Daily Caller, 02/11/2012

On Friday’s “Special Report” on the Fox News Channel, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer doubled-down on an assertion he made last week about the inevitability of an Israeli strike on Iran to limit their nuclear capabilities.

Krauthammer referred to a David Ignatius Washington Post column, which indicated generally when Defense Secretary Leon Panetta thought such an attack might happen.

“Our own secretary of Defense has said it’s highly likely and he gave a timeframe — April, May, June, which means the Israelis think that the moment, the zone of immunity where they can no longer attack successfully is approaching,” Krauthammer said. “I think he is right. I think the Israelis are serious unless happens between now and midyear or even November that will threaten the regime, because it won’t change the policy. I think Israel will...

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Ted Belman

Jerusalem, Israel