carlos latuff
Juda, who is from Rafah, gave birth to three boys and one girl.
Juda’s husband, Muhammad Subhi expressed “overwhelming happiness” at the birth. The couple already have a two-year-old daughter.
Well, actually, often the thing that stands out to me, as a Palestinian, about my birthday is that the year before on October 25, 1972, Golda Meir had delivered a speech where she says–and I am not paraphrasing–“I cannot sleep at night knowing how many Arab babies are being born this same night.” This was a speech delivered to her countrymen and women as a nationalistic call to ethnic and national pride. It gave the sense that Palestinians’ children’s birth was the nightmare for the Israeli enterprise. This idea that we had so seeped into the subconscious and the fabric of creation of this state … would keep people up at night. That’s what I think about most when I think about my birthday in the context of a Palestinian exile community and the children that have been born to the refugees. Every child has a story like that. I just happen to have that year, very specifically bookended, but I think any Palestinian child born since that statement was made was a reflection of humanity that Golda Meir and her comments tried to diminish.
jonathan cook’s writing has long revealed this obsession in the zionist academy, government, and military in his writing. the real reason for ariel sharon removing israeli terrorist colonists from gaza was about shifting the population balance so jews could outnumber palestinians (if we count all of historic palestine’s population at present the numbers are about equal). the israeli terrorists who tried to invade um el fahem last week and who were prevented by a strong, unified town who successfully fought the army and the settlers were doing so in relation to these population transfers and shifts as the zionists continue to try to terrorize palestinian citizens in various ways, including with threats of ethnic cleansing (”transfer” in zionist speak). here is what cook said about um al fahem a couple of years ago in relation to this notion of the demographic bomb:
The idea of land swaps and a “transfer of citizenship,” as some called it, found support among Israeli leaders of the left and right. In an interview in 2002, Ehud Barak suggested that it was “not inconceivable” that Israeli Arabs have their citizenship transferred, though he added: “I don’t recommend that government spokesmen speak of it.” In fact, two years earlier he had privately pondered a very similar scheme—a “land swap” in which the Triangle and its residents would pass to the new Palestinian state—at Camp David, as the Israeli media later reported. His enduring passion for transfer was not dimmed by surveys showing that 83 percent of the inhabitants of Umm al-Fahm, the largest town in the Triangle, were vehemently opposed.
Barak’s successor, Ariel Sharon, was reported to be equally enamored of the proposal. In February 2004 he floated the idea of transferring the Triangle in an interview with the Ma’ariv newspaper, adding that the issue was being examined by his legal advisers. When Israeli Arab leaders denounced the proposal, Sharon’s spokesman, Ra’anan Gissin, questioned their motives: “Palestinians hoping to conquer Israel with the demographic bomb [higher birth rates] are obviously opposed.”
A few weeks later, after Sharon’s comments had been widely reported, he backtracked, publicly reassuring the inhabitants of the Triangle that they were “an integral part of Israel’s population.” But investigations by the Hebrew media revealed that Sharon had been secretly studying the “transfer of citizenship” idea with officials since he was first elected prime minister in early 2001. According to reporter Ben Caspit, Sharon had discussed the plan with Shimon Peres, then his Foreign Minister, suggesting it was the best way to protect Israel’s Jewish majority. Sharon reportedly told his confidants: “If we are already exchanging territory [with the Palestinians], why give empty land when we can transfer land with Arabs living on it?” Sharon’s main problem, Caspit reported, was that such a transfer could be considered a war crime under international law. Government officials were therefore trying to “formulate a package ‘to sell’ to the world.”
Despite its substantial Arab-Palestinian student population, Haifa University harbors, or at least tolerates, a culture of racism — against Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular — which manifests itself in the fact that members of its faculty espouse racist “theories,” publish bigoted research papers, and advocate ethnic cleansing with impunity. The university has consistently and systematically failed to censure such academics or to properly investigate accusations of racism raised against them.
It provides institutional support to racist academics and their research activities. The most notorious of these academics is Arnon Sofer, chair of geo-strategy at Haifa University and vice-chair of its Center for National Security Studies. He is also known in Israel as the prophet of the “Arab demographic threat.” He takes credit for the route of the Israeli apartheid wall — declared illegal by the International Court of Justice in the Hague, on July 9, 2004 — saying, “This is exactly my map.”
Prof. Sofer, who views the high birth rate of the Bedouin Palestinian citizens of Israel as a “tragedy,” and has no patience for “democracy and pretty words,” has for many years openly advocated “voluntary transfer” — or soft ethnic cleansing — of Palestinians in the occupied territories as well as Palestinian citizens of Israel, in order to guarantee “a Zionist-Jewish state with an overwhelming majority of Jews.” In one particularly telling prediction, Sofer says, “When 2.5 million [Palestinians] live in a closed-off Gaza, those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day. If we don’t kill, we will cease to exist. The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the [Jewish] boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings.”
and yet the attack on two israeli colonist children yesterday, i’m sure, will get much more play in the western media than the decades of attacks, of murders targeting palestinian children made plain by the boasting tshirts. here is the report on the attack from ma’an yesterday:
Israel’s Magen David ambulance service attempted to rescue the 16-year-old but failed. The seven-year-old child injured in the attack was taken to Hadassah Hospital in East Jerusalem.
According to news reports the alleged attacker managed to flee.
In the nearby Palestinian village of Safa, Israeli forces overran the town, imposing a curfew and raiding houses. According to witnesses, more than 50 military vehicles have invaded the village. According to witnesses in the village, 28 Palestinians have been detained. It is not known where they are held. Israeli troops are firing in the air. Israeli forces also invaded the town of Surif.
A self-proclaimed Palestinian armed group calling itself the Imad Mughniyya Brigades, after a slain Hizbullah leader, claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement received by Ma’an. The group said that the operation was in response to the “crimes committed against Palestinians by the occupation.”
The Al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of Islamic Jihad, praised the attack. In a statement the group said it “congratulates this heroic attack that comes as a normal response to the Israeli assaults against Palestinians, to Netanyahu, and to threats to the Al-Aqsa Mosque.”
It has also been revealed that the father of the 7-year-old victim is Ofer Gamliel, who is serving a 15-year prison sentence for attempting to bomb a Palestinian girls school in Jerusalem in 2002. He and his co-conspirators were known as the “Bat Ayin Militia.“
According to the Ynet, the website of Israel’s mass-selling Yediot Ahronot newspaper, Ofer Gamliel will be allowed to visit Hadassah hospital after a decision by the Israel Prison Service.
Gamliel is serving a 15-year-sentence for attempting blow up a Palestinian girls school in East Jerusalem in 2002. He three to four co-conspirators were members of a group called the “Bat Ayin Underground.” Three men were ultimately convicted in the plot.
Police saw the men planting the bomb – a trailer backed with explosives – outside the school in Abu Tor in the early hours of 29 April 2002. The bomb was attached to a timer, set to explode at 7:25am, as children were arriving for school.
Two men were arrested on the spot and the bomb defused. Gamliel fled the scene and was arrested a few days later.
abu mahmoud harb, here in balata refugee camp in nablus, whose home was recently invaded by israeli terrorists identifies the bizarre inverted logic behind this idea of who the real terrorists are as reported in the palestine monitor:
Balata Refugee Camp is known for being very political and the heart of the Palestinian resistance, many leaders of both Intifadas came from the camp and in 1987 when people in the Gaza Strip ignited the First Intifada, Balata was the first community in the West Bank to engage in violence. For this reason, the Israeli military has been especially hard on the people of Balata.
Imposing curfews, conducting nightly raids in the camp - in which they break down doors to the houses and destroy things inside, beat people, men and women, arrest, and sometimes kill people for being active in the resistance.
For example, only some weeks ago, during a night raid, several Israeli soldiers came to Abu Mahmoud’s apartment at 2am. The door was locked so they started kicking it while screaming and swearing. It woke him up so he opened the damaged door and immediately had an assault rifle put to his head by a soldier.
“Who are you? Why are you doing this and are you really going to kill me? I’m just an old man living here with my family! And I opened the door, I don’t want any problems so why are you putting a rifle to my face?” He then asked to talk to the officer in charge and the guy pointing the gun at him said that he was the officer in charge.
Abu Mahmoud was very surprised, because the person in charge should be someone smart and well educated. He asked him to at least have some respect and treat him as a human. The officer answered that he didn’t deserve to be treated as a human because he is a terrorist and that he teaches his children how to be terrorists.
“Who are the real terrorists here? Who kicked who out of their home and stole their land? Look at how many people that have died on both sides. Look at the weapons used by both sides. Look at all the past massacres and at what just happened in Gaza and tell me who the real terrorist is?”, shouted Abu Mahmoud, who indeed has a lot of things to teach to his children and grand-children: his personal story, the story of the family and of the Palestinian people in general, the fact that they are not living in a city but in a refugee camp, in a place that is their house but not their home…
And even thought it might be one of the reasons why two of his sons are dead, he still thinks he was right to tell all his children the truth about what happened to their family and the Palestinian people since 1948, and keeps, and will keep, telling it to his grand-children.
One of his sons was a suicide bomber and even thought Abu Mahmoud knows that killing innocent people is a bad thing he believes that the main reason why it happened is the Israeli occupation and the behavior of the Israeli soldiers in the refugee camp. Without that it would not have happened, so he says that if you don’t want the consequences you have to fix the cause.
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