'Jihad' is Jihad. It's Intersectional

Big story in the US:

Linda Sarsour, an organizer of the Women’s March, drew criticism over a speech she gave at the Islamic Society of North America convention over the weekend after some misunderstood her use of the word "jihad."

In her speech, Sarsour talked about protecting the Muslim community and the need for Muslims to defend themselves against the Trump administration, which many view as overtly hostile to Muslims and other minority groups.

Some interpreted her used of the “jihad,” which means “to struggle”, as a call for violence. The word has many uses in the Islamic faith, but has been used by terrorists such as ISIS and often is translated as “holy war.”

During her speech, Sarsour told a story about a man who asked the Muslim prophet “What is the best form of jihad or struggle?” The answer from the prophet, according to Sarsour was: “A word of truth in front of a tyrant ruler or leader, that is the best form of jihad.”

Well, be careful America.  It's an intersectional thing:

Rabin Says Arafat's 'Jihad' Remark Set Back Peace EffortBy CLYDE HABERMAN,Published: May 20, 1994

JERICHO, West Bank, May 19— Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel said today that Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, had harmed the Middle East peace talks with a speech in which he seemed to call for a holy war to liberate Jerusalem for Muslims.

Mr. Rabin waved off Mr. Arafat's explanation that he was not calling for violence when he talked recently of a "jihad" for Jerusalem -- an Arabic word often interpreted as holy war -- but rather was speaking in a religious sense and urging a crusade for peace.

Through a spokesman, the Israeli leader said the Palestinian had provided "a far-fetched explanation of an unnecessary misstep, one that badly affects, and will badly affect in the future, the peace process with the Palestinians."

While there was no sign of a crisis in negotiations between Israel and Mr. Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, Israeli officials were nonetheless rattled by the "jihad" dispute, for it reaffirmed their worst fears that the P.L.O. leader is not someone they can trust. And if that is the case, they acknowledge, they leave themselves vulnerable to opposition questions about why they are talking with him in the first place.

In case you forgot, it set back the peace process (as if there ever was one from Arafat's angle).

America, meet Yasir Arafat, er, Linda Sarsour.



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Married

I caught this

Hitler and his henchmen tried their hardest to keep Eva out of the spotlight, and forbade any picture of her to be published, because they were keen to project the idea that he was “married to Germany”. 

I recalled that description as being applied to another:

An assessment of the personality of Yasser Arafat must take into consideration both his deep religiosity and his fierce nationalism (even if he tended to equate Palestinian nationalism with himself). He often said that he was married to the Palestinian cause, and indeed he had no other bride—at least until he married Suhā al-Ṭawīl, a Sorbonne-educated Palestinian woman of Christian origin, in 1990.

And this

A longtime bachelor who declared himself "married to the revolution," a then 62-year-old Yasser Arafat, stunned Palestinians when he wed his 28-year-old private secretary, Suha, in a secret ceremony in Tunisia in 1991.

The problem with this is that he seemed to be engaged in divorcing the Jewish people from their national homeland.

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Clinton Surprises: 16 Meters of Wall

As we all should know, the Clinton Parameters for peace in December 2000 included this:

Israel would gain sovereignty over the Western Wall. The Palestinians would gain sovereignty and Israel would gain "symbolic ownership" over the rest [that should be the 'underground' are] of the Temple Mount, with both parties sharing sovereignty over the issue of excavations under the Temple Mount.

However, all seem surprised today at reports of Clinton restating history:

Former United States President Bill Clinton claimed on Wednesday [in] comments...made during a speech at Georgetown University in Virginia [you can hear/see the clip in this Hebrew news item], during which he made some revelations regarding the Camp David Summit attended by himself, then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and then-PA Chairman Yasser Arafat.

"The Israelis offered to give it (the Temple Mount) to the Palestinians," Clinton was quoted by Channel 2 as having said.

“They disagreed about only 16 meters of the Western Wall, about which Israel was right,” he continued, saying that the 16 meters in question were land leading to the Western Wall tunnels and that “if you got in, you could do mayhem to the ruins of the temples.”

True, Robert Malley claimed in the New York Times of July 8, 2001 that during the 2000 Camp David II, it was discussed that

Israel would exercise overall sovereignty over this area, known to Jews as the Temple Mount. 

and Moshe Amirav, in his book "Jerusalem Syndrome" on page 153, claims that Barak insisted on "not conceding the Temple Mount".  Greg Myre of the NYTimes writes in his book that the whole purpose of Arik Sharon ascending to the Temple Mount in September 2000, at the urging of Uri Dan, was to protest Barak's concessions on Jerusalem and the Temple Mount.

Aaron Klein, though, already in 2007, reported on what Haaretz published:

REVEALED: ISRAEL AGREED TO FORFEIT TEMPLE MOUNTPublished: 12/13/2007
In spite of longstanding denials by top officials here, the Israeli government in 2000 agreed to relinquish the Temple Mount – Judaism’s holiest site – to the Palestinians during U.S.-backed negotiations, according to declassified documents made public today.

According to declassified Israeli government documents published today by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, during U.S.-led negotiations in 2000 at Camp David, Ehud Barak, then prime minister, agreed sovereignty over the Temple Mount would be either “ambiguous” or control would be determined based on the bond of each party to the site. The Palestinians would therefore control the upper sections of the Mount, which houses the Al Aqsa Mosque and also is the site of the First and Second Jewish Temples.

...Barak at times denied he offered the Temple Mount to the Palestinians, but he also indicated during interviews he was willing to compromise over the site.

But what Clinton got wrong was this:

a. Arafat never believed the Temple was ever on the Temple Mount

b. the "mayhem" would not be done to the "ruins of the temples" (see 'a' above) but Arafat's fear was that Israel would undermine the Al-Aqsa Mosque or Dome of the Rock or cause the whole compound to collapse.

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Make Up Your Minds - Poisoned or What?

(Reuters) - The head of a Russian forensics agency said on Tuesday that samples from the body of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat had revealed no traces of radioactive polonium, a Russian news agency reported.

AFP - Swiss radiation experts have confirmed they found traces of polonium on clothing used by Yasser Arafat which "support the possibility" the veteran Palestinian leader was poisoned.

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Don't Exhume Arafat

Says his sister:-

A sister of late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is not among those, including his widow, calling for the Palestinian Authority to exhume the body in the wake new questions about his death.

"Leave him to rest in his soil,” Khadija Arafat said Thursday, saying she has been overwhelmed with media inquiries following an Al Jazeera investigation that raised the possibility Arafat was poisoned.

"Would exhuming his body bring him back to life?" she said. "Let him be comfortable where he's lying ... To satisfy my conscious and my brother in his grave, let's not talk about exhuming his body."

Think, first the supposed poisoning actually was used in a cultural construction to compare him to Mohammed  who was Islamic sources relate was poisoned by a Jewish woman.

And now, I think, the exhumation would compare his the the resurrection of Jesus.

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I Think I Know Who Killed Arafat

What killed Arafat according to Al-Jazeera?

Polonium-210.

What killed, on 1 November 2006, Alexander Litvinenko?

Lethal polonium-210-induced acute radiation syndrome.

Who killed Litvinenko?

NYTimes reported:

Mr. Litvinenko’s family issued what they said was his deathbed statement accusing President Vladimir V. Putin of “barbaric and ruthless” murder, a charge promptly rejected by the Russian leader.

Who killed Arafat again?

P.S.  Of course, it could all be a hoax.

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Arafat-cum-Muhammed: Poisoning Minds

My take on the Arafat cause of death hullabaloo:

There is a campaign to compare him to Muhammed.

Consider this from a recent book review of JEWS, CHRISTIANS, AND THE ABODE OF ISLAM: MODERN SCHOLARSHIP,MEDIEVAL REALITIES by Jacob Lassner, The University of Chicago Press, 336 pp.

...Lassner is extremely reluctant, for example, to arrive at firm conclusions with regard to what actually happened during Muhammad's hostile—and in one famous instance bloody—encounters with the Jews of Arabia. The traditional Muslim accounts of these events were set down in writing at least a century after they occurred and, for reasons that Lassner skillfully elucidates, cannot be taken at face value...

...He mentions, for instance, the story of the Jewish woman from the oasis of Khaybar who gave Muhammed poisoned donkey meat after his slaughter of the Jewish forces there. One could readily understand, given tribal sensibilities, why she would have chosen to avenge her murdered kinfolk. However, in this case, the meat would appear more seasoned with irony than any deadly substance.  So delicate was the poison applied, the Prophet only succumbed to the tainted meat some four years later.

Unfortunately, this tale and other less laughable reports laid the lasting foundations for popular and scholarly perceptions of Jews that were generally more negative than those that Muslims held of Christians.

Or was it three years later?

In any case, "proving Arafat was poisoned by Israel" fits into the Islamic cognitive mind-set.

That's why they are pushing it.  That's they way Muslims think, having been taught that story.

And this from PMW:

When Yasser Arafat became sick and died in November 2004, the PA spread the libel that Israel had poisoned him. It is possible that this particular fabrication was designed to connect Arafat with the Islamic tradition that Jews poisoned Muhammad, Islam’s prophet: 

“Aisha [wife of Muhammad] narrated: The Prophet in his ailment in which he died, used to say, "O 'Aisha! I still feel the pain caused by the food I ate at Khaibar [Jewish tribe], and at this time, I feel as if my aorta is being cut from that poison." (Sahih al-Bukhari, Volume 5, Book 59, Number 713)

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JPost:

 

Dr. Ely Karmon, of the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center's Institute for Counter-Terrorism, is a specialist in chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear terrorism.
Responding to an Al Jazeera report publishedWednesday, which said that specialists at the Institut de Radiophysique in Lausanne, Switzerland, discovered abnormally high levels of polonium on Arafat's belongings, Karmon said that the half life of the substance would make it impossible for polonium to have been discovered at such high levels if it had been used to kill Arafat eight years ago.
According to the Al-Jazeera report, polonium has a half-life of 138 days, "meaning that half of the substance decays roughly every four-and-a-half months."
And yet, eight years after Arafat's death, the Swiss scientists reported finding  polonium levels of 54mBq and 180mBq on his belonging, considered to be high levels.
"If it had been used to for poisoning, minimal levels should be seen now. Yet much higher levels were found. Someone planted the polonium much later," Karmon said.
"Because of the half life of the substance, the conclusion is that the polonium is much more fresh," he added.
Karmon added that the Al-Jazeera report raised additional unanswered questions. Referring to the fact that Arafat'swidow, Suha, provided the researchers with Arafat's belongings, Karmon asked, "If Suha Arafat safeguarded these contaminated materials, why, after seven years, was she not poisoned too? She touched these things and Arafat in hospital," he added.

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Just How Did Arafat Die?

I guest post David Gerstman on


The phantom menace


One of the big stories coming out of the Middle East today is that Yasser Arafat's body may be exhumed for testing of traces of Polonium 210, a toxic radioactive element. For years Palestinian leadership have claimed that Arafat was murdered by Israel.


Ma'an News from August, 2007:

Former political adviser to the late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, Bassam Abu Sharif, said on Saturday that former French President Jacques Chirac and three French doctors, who treated the late leader, are adamant that he was killed and know which poison killed him.

Ynet from January, 2009:

Nearly five years after Yasser Arafat died from what French doctors called a massive brain hemorrhage, Arab doctors will meet in Jordan to look into lingering suspicious the Palestinian leader was poisoned.

Saeb Erekat on Al Jazeera from March, 2009 (translated by MEMRI)

Let me recount two historical events, even if I am revealing a secret. On July 23, 200, in his meeting with President Arafat in Camp David, President Clinton said: “You will be the first president of a Palestinian state, within the 1967 borders – give or take, considering the land swap – and East Jerusalem will be the capital of the Palestinian state, but we want you, as a religious man, to acknowledge that the Temple of Solomon is located underneath the Haram Al-Sharif.” Yasser Arafat said to Clinton defiantly: “I will not be a traitor. Someone will come to liberate it after 10, 50, or 100 years. Jerusalem will be nothing but the capital of the Palestinian state, and there is nothing underneath or above the Haram Al-Sharif except for Allah.” That is why Yasser Arafat was besieged, and that is why he was killed unjustly.

Elder of Ziyon in April, 2009

As I reported on Monday, two days before the AP noticed it, Arafat's nephew is trying to put together a commission of doctors to prove that Arafat was poisoned. In Al-Quds today he even says that they are ready to take the "evidence" of poisoning to the International Criminal Court. But first, they have the pesky problem of, you know, proof.
Unfortunately, the initial meeting of Arafat's doctor cronies has been delayed.
Arafat's nephew, Nasser al Kidwa, who by sheer coincidence was also once the former "Palestinian Foreign Minister," said that the delay was simply because they couldn't get all the proper doctors together, and they will meet, although they don't know when.

He followed up in November, 2009.


Press TV from January, 2011

Former special advisor to Arafat, Bassam Abu Shareef, said the investigation conducted by British forensic experts had revealed that the late Palestinian leader was poisoned by thallium, IRNA reported on Tuesday.

Palestinian Media Watch has a few more instances and shows how the charge that Israel murdered Arafat is an element of Palestinian political culture.

At a PLO cultural celebration in the presence of the PA Minister of Culture, a child on stage performed a skit comparing Arafat's death to the death of Jesus by the Jews. 
Boy 1: "Father, father the Elder (Arafat). Why did it happen this way? Why did it happen this way? Death chose you, and you did not complete the path." 
Boy 2: "Do not ask why it happened this way. Yesterday they (i.e., the Jews) crucified Jesus; today they poisoned the father, the Elder (Arafat)." 
[PA TV, June 4, 2010, Dec. 31, 2010]

The Washington Post reported in Yasser Arafat’s body may be exhumed to investigate claims that he was poisoned:

The debate gained fresh momentum on Tuesday night, when the al-Jazeera news channel broadcast a new investigation into Arafat’s death. It revealed the findings of a Swiss forensic institute that examined some of his belongings preserved by his widow.
According to al-Jazeera, the scientists found unexplained traces of polonium-210 in his clothes and other effects used by the former leader after he fell ill. The institute also concluded that the levels of polonium found in his belongings were unusually high – up to 10 times higher than in control tests.
The Lausanne-based institute issued its own statement on Wednesday, confirming it had found an “unexplained amount of polonium-210” on Arafat’s personal effects. However, it cautioned that the results were “not sufficient to determine the cause of death.” The institute also pointed out that any interpretation of its results was difficult, not least because of the long time that had passed between Arafat’s death and the laboratory tests.

"Debate" is an odd term here. Is there anything to the charge that Arafat was poisoned? It's facts on one side and rumor and innuendo on the other.


I guess that the Washington Post felt that it had fallen behind the reporting curve, because this report was credited to the Financial Times. But is this really a news story?


The New York Times reported Palestinians May Exhume Arafat After Report of Poisoning:

Mr. Arafat became ill in October 2004 and was flown by helicopter out of the Muqata, his headquarters in Ramallah, in the West Bank, where he had been confined under an Israeli Army siege and virtual house arrest for more than two years. He was transferred to a French military hospital, where he died about two weeks later of unannounced causes.
Though the hospital records were never made public, fueling speculation and rumors about the cause of death, they were obtained by The New York Times in 2005. The records showed that he had died of a stroke that resulted from a bleeding disorder caused by an underlying infection. The infection was never identified. The hospital found no traces of poisons.
Two Palestinian investigative committees have so far failed to produce any conclusive findings. At a fractious convention of Mr. Abbas’s Fatah Party in 2009, the first such gathering in 20 years, one point of consensus was the notion that Israel was responsible for the death of Mr. Arafat, the founder of Fatah. Delegates blamed Israel for having kept the leader under siege, and Fatah officials said they would continue to investigate the circumstances of his death, and the suspicions that Israel had poisoned him.

There is some good solid information in these paragraphs. First of all, that the Times obtained Arafat's records, showing a cause of death. The second is that two Fatah committees, so far, have failed to prove that Arafat was killed. Given this, the Al Jazeera report seems more like a fishing expedition than anything.


(One aside on the New York Times article. The report reads:

The legacy left by Mr. Arafat is as confounding as he was in life. Revered by many as the revolutionary founding father of Palestinian nationalism, he was also reviled, particularly by many Israelis, who considered him a terrorist. He was among three recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 for his role in accepting the Oslo accords, a blueprint for peace with Israel, but nearly 20 years later his promises of a Palestinian state remain unfulfilled. Corruption was also rampant under his leadership.

That he was a terrorist is proven. The only question is whether or not he gave up the terror. Lately it's been proven conclusively that he never changed. What's confounding is not his legacy, but the degree to which people - many who should know better - obfuscate what an evil and corrupt man he was.)


Still neither the Washington Post nor New York Times was clear about the level of doubt expressed by the Swiss institute. Challah Hu Akbar found the document and tells us what it says in Al Jazeera’s Arafat Polonium Story Around Since At Least 2006:

We therefore chose to conduct 210Po measurements on samples that had been manifestly worn by Mr. Louvet and where stains of residual biological liquids could be suspected by direct eye observation.
Some of these samples show 210Po activities that are clearly above the values measured on other samples that had either not been worn or that were not containing visible suspect stains.
This observation alone is however not sufficient to draw a final conclusion because out of the 10 measurements performed on local samples totally unrelated with Mr Louvet's belonging, two show 210Po activities above the value of 2 mBq/g, which can be set as a limit for background value.

(Emphasis added by Challah Hu Akbar. "Louvet" is a pseudonym for Arafat.)


But the next paragraph in the report is fascinating too.

To clarify the origin of the measured 210Po, we should take into account that this nuclide is naturally present in the environment as a decay product coming from lead-210 (210Pb): 210Po is said to be supported by 210Pb. Therefore, we propose to wait until the beginning of June 2012 and measure the samples again. If we observe a significant amount of 210Po in the samples with high activities in the first measurements, this would show that 210Po is supported by 210Pb. This would therefore be a very strong argument in favor of a natural origin of the observed 210Po,although such a quantity would be very uncommon. Alternatively, if we do not measure a significant amount of 210Po, we should conclude that the high activity measured the first time does not come from the 210Pb decay and therefore is not explainable by a known natural phenomenon.

So a month ago a second test should have taken place to determine the source of the Polonium. Did it take place? If so what was the result? If it hasn't why is there talk of exhuming Arafat's body? Shouldn't the second test be performed first?

I could infer from this that the second test showed that there the Polonium in Arafat's personal effects was naturally occurring and that the reason the Palestinians are talking of exhuming his body is to keep the doubts alive.

This episode suggests three questions.

What does this say about the Palestinian political culture? Erekat was (and might still be) a major Palestinian political figure. Nasser al-Kidwa is too. Both have peddled this paranoid fantasy. They aren't crackpot columnist for some fringe newspaper.


What does this say about Al Jazeera? Numerous American media stories tell us that Al Jazeera is a professional news organization but it just comes from a different perspective. This shows that it doesn't even pretend to have any sort of journalistic standards.


What does this say about the mainstream media? Two major American papers ran stories based on the Al Jazeera report without doing the minimum level of checking. Only some right wing pro-Israel American blogger did that checking.

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More from Challah:

AJ's timing and the show itself was meant as attack against Abbas and PA.

Also, let's not forget that it was AJ in 09 that aired Qaddoumi's claims that Dahlan and Abbas were part of plot to murder Arafat. 

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAMgAPd8YxI

Article: http://www.aljazeera.net/news/pages/0dae4a49-db31-420f-b1ac-f0eda96900af

However, not surprising some circles are spinning as "look, Israel did it."

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There Were Times When Tom Knew Yasser

Found here:

That's Tom Friedman with an arch-terrorist circa 1984.

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The Most Colossal Diplomatic Error

And what was that?

Well, read Bill Clinton about the people called "Palestinians":-

...I offered an agreement in great detail in 2000, and the then government of Israel headed by Ehud Barak took it, and the Palestinians basically didn't say yes or no, they continued their negotiation-by-non-negotiation strategy, in the most colossal diplomatic error in my lifetime.

Now, I know there are all these apologists [Richard Malley, for example - YM] who say there was something else going on. It's just not true. And there are people in Arafat's entourage, including Arafat, who told two Arab leaders they were going to take the deal. And he told me he was desperately determined to make a deal before I left office. Otherwise, it would be five years before he could take one.

And, instead, they took the bait and started the second intifada when Ariel Sharon went up on the Temple Mount. And we're living with it.

Some other things said:

Israel is different...There are now a million Israelis that they call from Russia...they're highly territorial, so that, on domestic political issues, they might vote left-of-center, but they don't think they ought to give up any land.

...Natan Sharansky, the great human rights activist, was in the Netanyahu Cabinet in 1998. When I made a deal with them at Wye River, Sharansky was the only one who wouldn't support it. He said, I come from the biggest country in the world to one of the smallest. And you, pointing at me, wish me to cut it in half. No thank you.

In other words, don't tell me about the history. Don't tell me about the Palestinians being here 2,000 years. Don't tell me about nothing. It's ours. Why should we give it up?

And this on security without Judea and Samaria:-

Do you remember when the missiles went from Gaza into Israel? There was a lot of sympathy when Israel said we're going to go clean that out. Keep in mind, there were a lot of missiles that killed a few people. One thing is that never changes is the trajectory of technology. It's only a matter of time when those missiles have GPS missiles on them. Then you have a few missiles killing a lot of people. No matter how good their security is, they may -- there may never be a time when they can fly 400 missiles again but now maybe they only need four for all hell to break loose.

So, if you consider those issues from an Israeli perspective, not CNN, not Clinton and not Obama, you'll understand that why Judea and Samaria will remain under Israeli administration or even sovereignty.



(Kippah tip: JW)


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Uri Dan Had Opinions

Uri Dromi reviewed Uri Dan's last book on Ariel Sharon and wrote:-

On September 13, 1993, I stood beside Uri Dan on the White House lawn. As the director of Israel's Government Press Office under prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, I was in charge of the Israeli journalists who had traveled there to witness the historic ceremony of reconciliation between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. A question hovered in the air: Would the two old enemies, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, shake hands?

The officials came out of the White House and walked toward the small, tense audience assembled on the lawn. And then Bill Clinton, with his trademark charm, turned the two men toward each other: an enthusiastic Arafat and a dour-faced Rabin who, gripped by a visceral sense of foreboding, wanted nothing more than to be somewhere else at that moment. Then, the inconceivable happened: They shook hands, and a roar of joy went up from the audience. Even cynical longtime journalists could not disguise their enthusiasm. Everyone joined the celebrations.

Everyone, that is, except Uri Dan. The veteran reporter, who died in December at age 71, stood beside me frowning and said to his colleagues in disgust: "What are you so happy about? Many funerals will come out of this wedding." We all looked at him with pity: Here was the professional spoilsport, unable to give credit for success to anyone except his master, Ariel Sharon.

Years passed and indeed, that wedding was followed by many funerals, many eulogies in both Hebrew and Arabic.