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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Phyllis Chesler</title>
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		<title>An Eye for an Eye in Tehran</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/phyllis-chesler/an-eye-for-an-eye-in-tehran/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=an-eye-for-an-eye-in-tehran</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/phyllis-chesler/an-eye-for-an-eye-in-tehran/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Aug 2011 04:12:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Phyllis Chesler]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=100492</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Acid-blinded woman forgives her attacker.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/iran-acid.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-100497" title="iran acid" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/iran-acid.jpg" alt="" width="410" height="288" /></a></p>
<p>Despite my own copious critiques, even I must concede that the American mainstream media really does print the bad news about Islamic gender apartheid—but it does so without drawing any “politically incorrect” conclusions, not even on their op-ed pages.</p>
<p>Over the years, the American mainstream media has printed articles about Islamic and African female genital mutilation, the public gang-rapes of innocent young girls in Pakistan (like <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/14/opinion/14kristof.html" target="_blank">Mukhtaran Bibi</a>) and the repeated gang-rapes of girls and women in Darfur by ethnic Arab Muslims (the <em>New York Times</em> simply <a href="http://www.phyllis-chesler.com/139/when-you-cant-say-muslim" target="_blank">refused</a> to use the word “Muslim”). The media has covered the disfiguring acid attacks on girls and women in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran. Maddeningly, it draws no conclusion.</p>
<p>On November 3, 2004, an Iranian man, Majid Movahedi, <a href="http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/press-releases/blinding-man-with-acid-as-retribution-punishment-amounts-to-torture-says-amnesty-international-urgin" target="_blank">poured a bucket of acid</a> on Ameneh Bahrami&#8217;s head as she was leaving work. He did so because she had rejected his many marriage proposals. Poor Bahrami was blinded and disfigured. Since then, she has endured 17 operations, including one in Spain which failed to successfully reconstruct her face. She now has only 40% of her sight and only in one eye.</p>
<p>Under Shariah law, the victim has the right to demand an eye-for-an-eye if other negotiations fail. In this case, the great Islamic Republic of Iran was prepared to have a physician drop acid into Movahedi’s eyes—unless his victim forgave him.</p>
<p>On July 31<sup>st</sup>, 2011, at the last minute, in the hospital, she did so. Movahedi wept.</p>
<p>I dunno. His crime was vicious—but the legal system in Iran is just as vicious. Shariah law is medieval. It may once have worked for warring tribes in Arabia 1400 years ago. Islamic imperialism and conversion by the sword has now led to people in south and central Asia to chanting from the Arab-language Qur’an without understanding a single word of Arabic—and to adopt harsh Arab desert justice in places where Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism once reigned.</p>
<p>Maybe poor Ameneh should marry the fiend; maybe Majiid should atone for his crime by serving and supporting his victim for the rest of his life. But Ameneh didn’t want him before; how much more repulsive he must seem to her now.</p>
<p>On July 31, 2011, on the same day Ameneh forgave the man who blinded and disfigured her, the <em>New York Times</em> ran two pieces on their front page. One <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/31/us/31shariah.html/?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">article</a> continued its non-stop jihad against the anti-jihadic/anti-Shariah bloggers (whom it blames for the “Islamophobic” Norwegian massacre of mainly ethnic infidel Norwegians). The other <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/31/world/asia/31herat.html" target="_blank">article</a>, right beneath it, is titled: “Afghans Rage at Young Lovers; A Father Says Kill Them Both.”</p>
<p>“Lovers”? Hardly. These two seventeen-year-olds have possibly—probably—exchanged glances and perhaps a love letter or two. Maybe they <em>once</em> held hands or even <em>once</em> dared to share a quick, almost chaste kiss. Yes, these two seventeen year old Major Muslim Sinners decided it was better to marry than to burn in Hell. On their way to their (perhaps secret) wedding, “A group of men spotted the couple riding together in a car, yanked them into the road and began to interrogate the boy and the girl. Why were they together? What right had they? An angry crowd of 300 surged around them, calling them adulterers and demanding that they be stoned or hanged.”</p>
<p>The police rescued them from the raging mob but in the process killed a man. The girl’s family now want her dead; the mob wants the boy dead too because he is a Tajik and she is a Hazara. The family of the dead man have also sworn to kill her—“unless she marries one of their other sons (in order to pay) her debt.”</p>
<p>Funny, you don’t look like a barbarian.</p>
<p>The reporter, Andrea Elliott, notes that another young Afghan couple who had also fallen in love “were stoned to death (in Kunduz) by scores of people—including family members—after they eloped. The stoning marked a brutal application of Shariah law, captured on a video.”</p>
<p>Thus, Elliott’s article, while painting a horrifying picture of raging, out-of-control rural Afghan lynch mobs, also praises the Afghan police in Herat for having rescued the young Romeo and Juliet as well as the local clerics for having refused to condemn them. This is surely a point in their favor, but what conclusion does Elliott draw? Does she honestly believe that the police will prevail against the girl’s family who have been shamed and are now out for her blood? Is there no expert she might have consulted on this point? Does Elliot really understand that such Shariah practices are coming our way, that in fact, they are already here?</p>
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		<title>Rome Stands With Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/phyllis-chesler/rome-stands-with-israel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=rome-stands-with-israel</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 21 Jul 2011 04:30:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Phyllis Chesler]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=99340</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The unprecedented 2010 rally in Rome for Israel has now been memorialized as a new book.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/italian_israel_rally.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-99344" title="italian_israel_rally" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/italian_israel_rally.gif" alt="" width="375" height="249" /></a></p>
<p>Israel continues to endure the fallout from the <em>Mavi Marmara</em> debacle; Israel gets blamed for defending herself even though Turkish hired assassins had come with the express purpose of assaulting and murdering Israeli soldiers.</p>
<p>In the teeth of this cruel public relations disaster, the indomitable Italian parliamentarian <a href="http://www.fiammanirenstein.com/pagine.asp?id=2">Fiamma Nirenstein</a>, the <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/145337">chair of the International Council of Jewish Parliamentarians</a>, asked me to write something that would be read at a massive pro-Israel rally that she, together with Giuliano Ferrara, the publisher of <a href="http://www.ilfoglio.it/"><em>Il Foglio</em></a>, helped organize.</p>
<p>The rally took place on October 7, 2010, in Rome. More than 3,000 people were present at the Temple of Hadrian. Among those present were Italy’s prime minister, the president of the Chamber of Deputies, president of the Senate, the mayor of Rome, the president of the Jewish community of Rome, the chief rabbi of Rome, and a former Prime Minister of Spain. Messages from Prime Minister Netanyahu and from a distinguished host of intellectuals and politicians were beamed in.</p>
<p>I am now holding a <a href="http://www.fiammanirenstein.com/articoli.asp?Categoria=11&amp;Id=2627">book</a> that memorializes this event: <em>Per La Verita, Per Israele: Mille voci al Tempio di Adriano </em>(<em>For The Truth, For Israel: A Thousand Voices at the Temple of Hadrian</em>). Each contribution appears in both Italian and English. The pieces are passionate, sophisticated, and written by people from many countries, including Italy, Spain, France, Norway, Finland, Holland, the United States, and Israel, etc., including pieces by Iranian dissidents in exile, Iraqis in exile, apostates in Parliament (Magdi Cristiano Allam), the Association of Arab Women in Italy, and Nobel Laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini. My most excellent colleagues Bruce Bawer, Melanie Phillips, Benny Morris, and of course Giuilo Meotti, all appear in the book.</p>
<p>Italy has a long and sordid history of persecuting its Jews. The word “ghetto” comes from the district in Venice in which Jews were forced to live and where they were locked in after dark. I recently took a tour of Jewish Rome and, since I love Italy, was especially saddened by the stories of repeated massacres, pogroms, and ritual persecution that afflicted the Jews of every region.</p>
<p>And still, a remnant of Italian Jewry survived. Alas, <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4081264,00.html">so does anti-Semitism</a>.</p>
<p>Given the ongoing events, i.e. the flotilla and flytilla that failed, the hostile mass “surges” into Jewish Israel, the sabotage of the gas lines from Egypt to Israel, and the upcoming UN vote on Palestinian statehood—all of which amounts to the Third Intifada—I hope that Nirenstein is ready to rally soon again.</p>
<p>The 2010 rally in Rome, and now the book that memorializes it, parts company with Italian history. It is an act of profound resistance which I applaud. Here is what I wrote, and what was read for me at this rally.</p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p>*</p>
<p><strong>The War In Jerusalem Will Spare Nobody. After the Jews, It Will Be the Christians’ Turn</strong>.</p>
<p>Without doubt, Israel potentially faces extinction, possibly a <a href="http://pajamasmedia.com/phyllischesler/2010/04/13/jews-confront-the-abyss/">Second</a> <a href="http://www.phyllis-chesler.com/171/how-a-holocaust-happens">Holocaust</a>.</p>
<p>Indeed, many Europeans continue Hitler’s Holocaust by supporting fifty-seven Islamic apartheid nation states against the single Jewish democratic state.</p>
<p>The worldwide media has become totally “Palestinianized” and Stalinized. Palestinians—even the haters, terrorists, and torturers, are naught but noble, innocent victims. Israel has literally become Orwell’s <em>1984</em> “Goldstein,” whom propagandized mobs are taught to scapegoat for their every conceivable sorrow.</p>
<p>The ideological assault against Israel has escalated. Daily, hourly, in every language, the media repeats Big Lies. Israel is the “Nazi, apartheid” state, the “colonial” aggressor; neat trick, that. Bloody Muslim imperialism and Islamic religious and gender apartheid are thus denied and projected onto Israel.</p>
<p>Israel is essentially, existentially, “evil.”</p>
<p>In 2005, Ahmadinejad said that Israel must be “wiped off the map.” In 2006, he said that the Middle East would be better off “without the existence of the Zionist regime” and that Israel would “soon be wiped out.”</p>
<p>President Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust, but really, he feels Hitler did not go far enough. Thus, he is taking up where Hitler left off—Amadinejad’s intention is a clearly stated genocidal one.</p>
<p>No one is stopping him.</p>
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		<title>Terrorists in Drag: Bombs Beneath the Burqa</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/phyllis-chesler/terrorists-in-drag-bombs-beneath-the-burqa/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=terrorists-in-drag-bombs-beneath-the-burqa</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/phyllis-chesler/terrorists-in-drag-bombs-beneath-the-burqa/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 06 Jul 2011 04:43:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Phyllis Chesler]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=97860</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Taliban killers caught wearing their mothers’ chaudries.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Picture-2.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-97861" title="Picture-2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Picture-2.gif" alt="" width="375" height="266" /></a></p>
<p>There they all stand, guilty as sin, Afghan Taliban terrorists disguised in women’s burqas—but exposed when they were captured by the Afghan Border Police. Their photo (or rather photos) were taken by an Afghan photographer somewhere near Jalalabad and have just been seen worldwide.</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Picture-3.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-97862" title="Picture-3" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Picture-3.gif" alt="" width="375" height="248" /></a></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Picture-4.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-97863" title="Picture-4" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Picture-4.gif" alt="" width="375" height="276" /></a></p>
<p>One of these charmers was wearing an explosive vest; six had AK-47s. Clearly they were up to no good. One wonders how long they will remain in jail and what they will do when they emerge.</p>
<p>These photographs conclusively validate the concern that <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2006/11/niqabs-and-burqas-as-security-threats">Dr. Daniel Pipes</a> has had about the security risk that burqas represent. For the last six years, Dr. Pipes has been detailing the number of common criminals and Islamist terrorists who have robbed jewelry stories and <a href="http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/niqabs-and-burqas-as-security-threats-part-5-the-most-interesting/question-1216369/">peeped</a> into women’s bathrooms while wearing burqas, or who have blown themselves and others up from under the protective cover of a mere woman’s shroud.</p>
<p>In December, 2009, a suicide bomber dressed in a full veil and abaya gained access to a ceremony attended by Somali government officials in Mogadishu and killed 19 people, including three cabinet ministers. In February, 2010, a female suicide bomber killed 54 Shia pilgrims in Baghdad. She was <a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article7011120.ece">dressed in an abaya</a>, which police said allowed her to hide an explosive device. In December, 2010 in Pakistan, a woman wearing a burqa threw a grenade and detonated an explosive vest at a U.N. security checkpoint, killing 41 people.</p>
<p>This is not just happening in Muslim-majority countries or in war zones.</p>
<p>In August, 2010, a man wearing a burqa robbed a bank in Silver Spring, Maryland. In January, 2011, a man wearing niqab (a face veil) attempted to rob a bank in Philadelphia. Three years earlier, also in Philadelphia, three men dressed as Muslim women stuck up a Bank of America branch. One of the men shot and killed a police officer during their getaway.</p>
<p>Why are burqas allowed in public? Or rather, why don’t we view them as potentially suspicious as opposed to a religious custom which we infidels are obligated to honor and revere?</p>
<p>For reasons of safety, the West, and for that matter the entire Muslim world, should immediately ban the burqa as a security risk.</p>
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		<title>The Flotilla of Fools off to Gaza</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/phyllis-chesler/the-flotilla-of-fools-sets-sail-to-gaza/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-flotilla-of-fools-sets-sail-to-gaza</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 23 Jun 2011 04:45:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Phyllis Chesler]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=96722</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[US boat will set sail with 36 passengers, 10 journalists, and novelist Alice Walker among them.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/us-boat-gaza.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-96723" title="us-boat-gaza" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/us-boat-gaza.gif" alt="" width="375" height="245" /></a></p>
<p>The flotilla is coming, the flotilla is coming.</p>
<p>European and North American activists, journalists, and mercenaries have set sail—or are about to do so—on <a href="http://mondoweiss.net/2011/05/freedom-flotilla-2-stay-human-to-set-sail-in-late-june.html">fifteen boats</a> with passengers from <a href="http://ustogaza.org/">twenty-two</a> mainly Western countries to “break the Israeli blockade of Gaza.” Spurred on by the anti-Potemkin Village images of Palestinian Arabs living in wretched refugee hovels, fenced in by an allegedly “apartheid” Israeli wall, oppressed by “Nazi” Israeli soldiers for “racist” reasons (and not because the Palestinian leadership practices both Islamic gender and religious apartheid as well as terrorism)&#8211;the Good People are sailing to the rescue.</p>
<p>Bad enough that Israel is surrounded by twenty-two hostile Arab countries plus a genocidally anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli Iran, a country which has positioned soldiers in Lebanon, Gaza, and Syria.</p>
<p>Bad enough that the United Nations and the Palestinian leadership are planning to unilaterally declare a Palestinian state on sovereign Israeli land.</p>
<p>Bad enough that the Western mainstream media and university campuses have rendered the most virulent anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism respectable and have intimidated students with endless replays of Gaza on the Hudson, Gaza on the Atlantic and Gaza on the Pacific—now, the flotilla is also coming. They say they plan to “non-violently” “provoke” Israel into a forbidden display of self-defense.</p>
<p>Boats are leaving or have already left carrying passengers from Ireland, the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Norway, Greece, Turkey, Canada, as well as the United States. Clearly, these Europeans do not believe that enough Jews died in the European Holocaust and/or do not want to see the descendents of Holocaust survivors continue to flourish in Israel. Perhaps some Europeans believe that their left anti-Israel politics will put them in good stead vis-à-vis the Islamists who are rapidly overwhelming Europe in a way that only Jean Raspail, the author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Camp-Saints-Jean-Raspail/dp/1881780074"><em>The Camp of the Saints</em></a> foresaw and would appreciate.</p>
<p>The boat from the United States has been dubbed “The Audacity of Hope.” (Now where have we heard that title before?) On it are 36 <a href="http://ustogaza.org/passengers-on-the-audacity-of-hope/">passengers</a> and four crew members, including some members of the Soros-funded Code Pink. Journalists from <em>The Nation</em>, CNN, NPR, CBS, <em>The New York Times</em>, Democracy Now, and the Palestinian News Agency Ma’an are “embedded” within the flotilla. “Embedded”? Isn’t that the word used to describe journalists who accompany troops in active battle?</p>
<p>Forgive me: I take words very seriously.</p>
<p>These self-styled activists and presumed anti-racists are slumming, partying, cruising for cheap thrills and even cheaper publicity. They yearn for cut-rate, no “burn” glory. They are ultimate conformists, careerists, “making their bones,” adding to their activist resumes by sticking it to the Jews. This is meant to prove that they are brave and principled.</p>
<p>In essence, they are engaged in a highly self-destructive form of political theatre: they are concretely manipulating symbols in the same way that Osama bin Laden did on 9/11. In the name of “caring,” these activists are surrendering to the most dangerous totalitarian and misogynist Islamist regime—but in the name of “freedom” and “justice.”</p>
<p>It is something that Orwell would appreciate.</p>
<p>The flotilla activists do not care about the facts on the ground, they refuse to understand that <a href="http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/05/25/fancy-restaurants-and-olympic-size-pools-what-the-media-won%E2%80%99t-report-about-gaza/">Gaza is filled with luxury</a> hotels, office buildings, palatial villas, nightclubs, beach clubs, and well-stocked markets. They focus only on the artificially maintained poverty-stricken areas, and not on the true reasons for it: namely, that the Arab and the Palestinian leadership have spent more than 60 years milking the West of both its guilt and its money on behalf of this single falsely created refugee population.</p>
<p>Novelist and poet Alice Walker is also on board the “The Audacity of Hope.” She has been giving <a href="http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/2794/michael_archer_qa_with_alice_w/">interviews</a> and publishing <a href="http://articles.cnn.com/2011-06-21/opinion/alice.walker.gaza_1_muslim-child-gaza-gandhi/2?_s=PM:OPINION">op-ed pieces</a> about her upcoming flotilla folly.</p>
<p>Ah, Alice. She and I go way back, and we have watched each other’s backs in significant ways over the years. Her current stance is painful, puzzling, unbalanced, and treacherous.</p>
<p>Walker has been in the forefront of the American civil rights, feminist, “womanist,” and ecological and animal rights movements; for many years, Walker was an activist against female genital mutilation—an African and African Muslim practice. She is best known and loved for her novel <em>The Color Purple</em>, which was made into a popular movie and Broadway play.</p>
<p>Tragically, but typically, Walker believes that Israelis are a more diabolical version of the white southern American racists who enslaved black Americans and then lynched, impoverished, exploited and segregated them. She imagines that the Palestinians are an even purer version of oppressed African-Americans. Most of all, she sees the Palestinians and herself as “non-violent” actors in this great drama.</p>
<p>Walker does not view Jews as the indigenous peoples of the Middle East or as equivalent to the “blacks” of Europe or as the most currently endangered infidel race in the Muslim Middle East. Walker refuses to acknowledge that Arabs and Muslims still practice (mainly African and skin color-based) slavery and real gender and religious apartheid. Instead, Walker scapegoats the Jews, specifically Israeli Jews, for the grave sins and crimes of blatant racism that are being committed by ethnic Arab Muslims in Muslim-majority countries such as Sudan, the Egyptian Sinai, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere.</p>
<p>Walker seems to have no idea that Muslims have a long, long history of slave-trading, sex slavery, imperialism, colonialism, conversion by the sword, and barbaric misogyny. Indeed, she seems to understand nothing about the reign of terror that Hamas has brought to the women, gays, artists, and vulnerable living beings in Gaza.</p>
<p>Walker does not command the facts; she has been fatefully tainted by crude propaganda, which she believes with her whole heart.</p>
<p>For example, Walker claims that 1,400 Gazans died during Operation Cast Lead, yet she fails to point out that, <a href="http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-btselem-witch-trials/">by Hamas’ own admission</a>, between 600 and 700 of these were armed Hamas militants.</p>
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		<title>Abbas&#8217; Fake Honor Killing Outrage</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/phyllis-chesler/abbas-fake-honor-killing-outrage/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=abbas-fake-honor-killing-outrage</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 22 Jun 2011 04:25:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Phyllis Chesler]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The Palestinian Authority leader leaves open an honor murder loophole. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/alg_mahmoud_abbas.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-96622" title="alg_mahmoud_abbas" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/alg_mahmoud_abbas.gif" alt="" width="375" height="290" /></a></p>
<p>Last month, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas “<a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43099010/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/t/harsh-west-bank-honor-killing-brings-tougher-law/">scrapped the laws</a>” which guaranteed “leniency” for honor killers. Family honor will no longer be a mitigating factor in such cases. On the West Bank and in Gaza, such barbaric murders of girls and women routinely draw sentences of six months or less.</p>
<p>Abbas was apparently driven to this unusual act by public outrage about an alleged honor killing which took place near Hebron on the West Bank.</p>
<p>Over a year ago, on April 20, 2010, 20-year-old Aya Baradiya disappeared. Her paternal uncle, 37-year-old Iqab Baradiya, and two accomplices had kidnapped her, bound her hand and foot, and threw her down a well, leaving her to die a slow and painful death. Her remains were not found for more than a year.</p>
<p>Aya was a religious woman who wore a hijab. Her university classmates described her as “chaste and noble-minded.”</p>
<p>What crime did she commit? Aya wanted to marry a man. Her suitor went through the traditional channels. Her parents approved of the match but wanted her to wait until she graduated. Her uncle, 17 years older than she was, strongly disapproved of the engagement. And so he killed her.</p>
<p>Although the media are now reporting her murder as an honor killing, it is not a classic honor killing.</p>
<p>For example, her uncle did not immediately confess. Although many honor killings are disguised as “suicides” or accidents and never made public, in general, those that do come to public light often involve proud confessions. Honor killers confess as a way of publicizing that they have “cleansed their shame.”</p>
<p>In Aya’s case, there was no “shame” that had to be cleansed.</p>
<p>In addition, Aya’s parents and siblings did not collaborate in the decision to murder their daughter, knew nothing about it, were haunted by her disappearance, and played absolutely no role in her murder. In fact, when Aya did not return home from university, her parents immediately reported her missing.</p>
<p>One suspects that her uncle may have had a highly inappropriate interest in his niece. His behavior suggests that he had an unnatural proprietary interest in her sexual and reproductive future and acted as if his niece was more like his daughter over whom he had the power of life and death.</p>
<p>How ironic that President Abbas, who has thus far been unmoved by the epidemic of honor killings among Arabs on the West Bank, in Gaza, and in Israel proper (where Israeli police make arrests), has now ostensibly decided to do the right thing vis-a-vis honor killings—when no honor killing has occurred. But is he <em>really </em>doing the right thing?</p>
<p>Aya’s murdering uncle has demonstrated the cruelty of Arab men towards Arab women; this includes the innocent women in their own immediate and extended families as well as women in general. Their misogyny is barbaric. Aya Baradiya was murdered—but it was not an honor murder. Please read <a href="http://www.meforum.org/2067/are-honor-killings-simply-domestic-violence">my</a> <a href="http://www.meforum.org/2646/worldwide-trends-in-honor-killings">studies</a> on honor killings in order to understand what one actually is. The following are some examples of genuine honor murders among Arabs on the West Bank, in Gaza, and in Israel, which apparently left President Abbas unmoved.</p>
<p>In 2003, Rofayda Qaoud of Abu Qash in the West Bank was murdered by her mother Amira Qaoud, who put a plastic bag over her head and sliced her wrists with a razor. Her crime? Rofayda had been raped by her two brothers and impregnated. According to her mother, the family’s honor demanded that she sacrifice her daughter for the violent crimes of her criminally psychopathic sons.</p>
<p>In 2007, Hamda Abu-Ghanem, 18, was shot to death in Ramle, Israel, by her brother and her cousin because some men in her town had referred to her as a “prostitute.” She was the eighth woman to have been murdered in her extended family in seven years and, in an unprecedented move, the family&#8217;s women finally went public.</p>
<p>In 2007, 21-year-old Nadia Abu Amar of Jerusalem was murdered by her three brothers and her uncle because she refused to marry the man she was engaged to and because she got her father arrested and convicted for assault.</p>
<p>In 2009, Fadia Najjar of Gaza City, a divorced mother of five, was bludgeoned to death by her father because she owned a cell phone. He suspected that she was using it to call a man outside of the family. The day after the murder, he turned himself into police.</p>
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		<title>Islam and Anti-Semitism at Yale</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/phyllis-chesler/islam-and-anti-semitism-at-yale/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=islam-and-anti-semitism-at-yale</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 13 Jun 2011 04:22:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Phyllis Chesler]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[analysis details]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[experience analysis]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[professor alberto]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[yale university]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The university suddenly shutters its initiative on the study of Jew-hatred after criticism of the Muslim world. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Yale-University.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-95910" title="Yale-University" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Yale-University.gif" alt="" width="375" height="296" /></a></p>
<p>And so, as I feared, by the end of the first week in June, 2011, Yale University shut down the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism (YIISA). They gave the initiative, which has been housed at Yale since 2006, until July to clear out.</p>
<p>The Palestinianization and Stalinization of the American professoriate coupled with the likely prospect of funding from the Arab world made this outcome inevitable — as did the non-stop diet of Big Lies about Israel and Jews in the mainstream media, at the United Nations, and in international human rights reports.</p>
<p>Only last year, there were bitter and very public complaints the Palestinians and their supporters made in response to YIISA’s best-ever conference on contemporary global anti-Semitism, which was held last August. And why? Because the scholars gathered by YIISA from at least five or more continents dared to focus on the Muslim and Islamist face of genocidal anti-Semitism.</p>
<p>The YIISA global conference, in which I was privileged to participate, was utterly unique in focusing not only upon the politically correct view of anti-Semitism as a Christian, Western, and European phenomenon, but also on its current and lethal incarnation in the Islamic and Islamist worlds. I, and a lonely and demonized handful of others, had been writing and speaking about this for the last eight to ten years, but this was the first time that voluminous, in-person evidence was brought to bear on this reality.</p>
<p>In the past, I was a single voice crying out. Here, at Yale, my voice was joined by others who had facts, experience, analysis, details and no small amount of drama. I was especially moved by the testimony of the Argentinian prosecutor of Iran’s terrorist plot against Argentina’s Jews, Professor Alberto Nisman. The terrorist mastermind of this heinous plot escaped justice when President Ahmadinejad appointed him Iran’s Minister of Defense. I had not known this. The information was chilling.</p>
<p>The existence of YIISA gave my evolving work on Islamic gender and religious apartheid and on the contemporary betrayal of both the Jews and the truth by Western intellectuals, including feminists, a home, a point of gravity, a place where my work could be both appreciated and critiqued; a place where I could meet and speak with serious scholars whose work I was either already familiar with or came to know courtesy of YIISA. This initiative is invaluable and does not exist anywhere else in the United States. It is a tragedy that Yale decided to shut it down.</p>
<p>In doing so, Yale has rendered racism respectable, has contributed to the academic isolation of scholars of contemporary anti-Semitism, and snuffed out truth-telling, genuine dissent, free speech, and academic freedom. This will be a permanent stain on Yale and on American academia.</p>
<p>Yale insists that the pre-existing study of dead Jews and of Jewish texts at Yale is sufficient proof that they are not anti-Semitic. Yale also insists that the initiative has not borne the kind of academic fruit to justify its continuation. Excuse me? According to Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post:</p>
<blockquote><p>Deputy Provost and Political Science Professor Frances Rosenbluth served on the faculty committee that reviewed YIISA’s performance and concluded that the university should close the center. In recent years Rosenbluth appointed Judge Richard Goldstone and Iran-regime apologists Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett to serve as senior fellows at Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Last September the Leveretts brought their students to New York to hold a seminar for them with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Unlike the YIISA conference, the move did not stimulate any significant controversy at the university.</p></blockquote>
<p>Glick’s point speaks for itself. Or, as Orwell taught us, not all pigs are equal.</p>
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		<title>Equating Anti-Semitism with &#8216;Islamophobia&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/phyllis-chesler/equating-anti-semitism-with-islamophobia/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=equating-anti-semitism-with-islamophobia</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/phyllis-chesler/equating-anti-semitism-with-islamophobia/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 31 May 2011 04:07:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Phyllis Chesler]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=94768</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[European Jewish and Muslim leaders sign a declaration confusing the Jewish and Muslim experience in Europe.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Isllam6.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-94775" title="Isllam6" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Isllam6.gif" alt="" width="375" height="340" /></a></p>
<p>Did you know that Jews and Muslims have a shared history in Europe? That Muslims have “deep roots” on the European continent and that Muslims are as imperiled by “Islamophobia” as Jews are by anti-Semitism?</p>
<p>Nothing could be further from the truth, and yet the first Gathering of European Muslim and Jewish Leaders issued a <a href="http://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/10299/jewish_and_muslim_leaders_urge_european_union_heads_not_to_pander_to_extreme_right">statement</a> on May 9<sup>th</sup> and just held a meeting in Brussels on May 30, 2011. Oddly enough, the meeting was organized by two <em>American</em> Jewish groups, Rabbi Marc Schneier’s Foundation For Ethnic Understanding and philanthropist Ronald Lauder’s World Jewish Congress, as well as by the European Jewish Congress.</p>
<p>No Muslim organization seems to have shared in organizing the meeting, although two organizations and more than a dozen Muslim leaders attended and signed the joint declaration.</p>
<p>Can you believe this? It this some kind of exercise in dhimmitude and self-delusion? Why are the Jews doing the heavy lifting for the far wealthier Muslim world? More important: Why support such dangerously misguided concepts?</p>
<p>At this moment in world history, why are Jews confusing “Islamophobia” with anti-Semitism? One understands that Muslims might want to assume whatever is left of Jewish victimhood and make it their own—but why are Jews enabling them to do so? If the Muslims are coming in great good faith, they would state some obviously truths, beginning with the Koranic roots of Jew- and infidel-hatred and the contemporary Islamist/genocidal intentions towards the Jewish State. Indeed, a new kind of statement from Muslims would include their understanding of&#8211;and desire to break from&#8211;the historical Muslim persecution of Jews and infidels in Muslim-majority countries.</p>
<p>This is not that kind of statement or declaration.</p>
<p>Anti-Semitism cannot, must not, be equated with Islamophobia. European Muslims have nothing to fear from European Jews. European Jews have everything to fear from European Muslims.</p>
<p>As Clemens Heni, a scholar of German anti-Semitism, has pointed out: &#8220;There is no other prejudice or form of racism which you can compare to anti-Semitism. If you look at Islam today, there is a (reason for) Islamophobia because Jihadists say, &#8216;We want to kill the unbelievers.&#8217; Jews never said that.” Those who equate legitimate fears of Islamist extremism with anti-Semitism, he argues, clearly “didn&#8217;t learn the lesson [of] the Holocaust. They are even downplaying the Holocaust itself.”</p>
<p>According to the declaration, “Jews and Muslims live side-by-side in every European country and our two communities are important components of Europe&#8217;s religious, cultural and social tapestry.” The document fails to mention that those Jews who live “side-by-side” with Muslims are in danger of being harassed, beaten, or even tortured to death, as was <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilan_Halimi">Ilan Halimi</a> of France.</p>
<p>The declaration commits an outrage against history by equating the Jewish experience in Europe with the Muslim experience in Europe, even though Jews have been living as a persecuted minority on the continent for more than a thousand years while most Muslims only arrived in large numbers after World War II. The declaration lumps together the Shoah (Holocaust), the slaughter of six million Jews, with the mass killings of some thousands of Muslims in Bosnia during the 1990s. It ignores the history of Muslim Spain in the Middle Ages, when both Christian and Muslim rulers persecuted Jews and Muslim mobs slaughtered them in pogroms. Needless to say, no Jewish outrages against Christian or Muslim communities have ever taken place on European soil.</p>
<p>With mock solemnity, the document proclaims, “We must never allow anti-Semitism…to become respectable in today’s Europe”—as if anti-Semitism, in its modern guise of anti-Zionism, weren’t already perfectly respectable in every corner of Europe.</p>
<p>Rabbis all over Europe have been telling their people to flee before it is too late. Many Jews have done so.</p>
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		<title>NYC Queers for Jihad</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/phyllis-chesler/nyc-queers-for-jihad/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=nyc-queers-for-jihad</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 30 May 2011 04:15:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Phyllis Chesler]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[New York City's LGBT Center sides with Israel-haters over supporters of the Jewish State.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Queers-Against-Israeli-Apartheid-02.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-94648" title="Queers-Against-Israeli-Apartheid-02" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Queers-Against-Israeli-Apartheid-02.gif" alt="" width="375" height="297" /></a></p>
<p>Last Friday, May 26, 2011, “Queers Against Israeli Apartheid” exercised their <a href="http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/05/26/3087900/gay-community-center-criticized-for-renting-space-to-anti-israel-group" target="_blank">hard-won right</a> to hold their meetings at New York City’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Center. Their right to hate and to be grossly misinformed was, as usual, presented as a free speech right and as yet another victim-driven Intifada (uprising).</p>
<p>This meeting followed the long campaign to vilify City University Trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld for daring to dissent from Tony Kushner’s anti-Israel views; Kushner, who happens to be both gay and Jewish, is nevertheless being given an honorary doctorate this week. These two events are intimately connected to each other and have been further empowered by President Obama’s shameful and dangerous actions towards the Jewish State.</p>
<p>We have all seen black and white footage of people dancing the night away, even as the crematoria or the machetes did their deadly work somewhere off camera. We understand that people elsewhere continue eating, having babies, buying first homes, going on vacations, even as genocidal wars rage on camera, even as tornadoes, nuclear plant meltdowns, and savage flash floods destroy whole communities elsewhere, also on camera.</p>
<p>Right now, in my little neck of the planet, Manhattan, the weather has turned gloriously sunny and summery; people are enjoying this respite from the unending rains and freezing winter weather. As people amble through leafy city streets, the world is preparing to slaughter the Jews again. As if the Muslim Brotherhood and the Gama’a al-Islamiyya in Egypt were not enough, a new swastika-flying Nazi party has emerged in Egypt—Egypt, Israel’s friendly neighbor; Egypt, which on Saturday <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/egypt-to-permanently-open-rafah-crossing-with-gaza-on-saturday-1.364038" target="_blank">opened the Rafah crossing</a> to admit even more weapons and terrorist fighters into Gaza in the unending Arab war against the Jews; Egypt, where many are demanding an end to the cold peace treaty with Israel.</p>
<p>Some say that <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-obama-did-to-israel/2011/05/26/AGJfYJCH_story.html" target="_blank">President Obama</a> might be touring Europe in order to gain European allies to help him pressure Israel into accepting the “pre-1967” <a href="http://spectator.org/archives/2011/05/26/an-auschwitz-borders-tour" target="_blank">Auschwitz borders</a>.</p>
<p>Here at home in America, we continue to enjoy Gazan Intifadas on our campuses. For example, the people are getting ready to party in the streets when, on June 3, 2011, City University of New York gives playwright Tony Kushner his honorary doctorate. In my view, they are feting Kushner, not so much for his art but rather for his celebrity and for his obsessively harsh views of Israel. The playwright has not led any campaigns against genocide in Sudan or against real gender and religious apartheid in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Like the “Queers Against Apartheid,” Kushner also scapegoats Israel for the crimes of the Arab and Muslim worlds.</p>
<p>The LGBT “queers” had threatened to storm or “surge” into the Center if they did not receive official approval for their group meeting.</p>
<p>“Surging” and “storming,” Arab street mob behavior, is a vision and a tactic that has been recommended by none other than journalist Tom Friedman, long adopted by international “Free Gaza” activists; it reminds me of Nazi Brownshirt behavior. Think Kristallnacht. Civilians and men in uniform breaking Jewish shop windows, breaking Jewish bones, burning Jewish books, eventually burning millions of living Jews.</p>
<p>But, you must understand: The German Nazis felt “victimized.” They had lost World War I and were humiliated because they should have been triumphant; they had also been unfairly economically penalized. Kushner and his supporters claim that the genuine dissent of one CUNY trustee, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, somehow “victimized” their views because their views are supposed to triumph, not Wiesenfeld’s. His pro-Israel view is not supposed to exist and, in their view, is not protected by academic or free speech rights. Only the anti-Israel views deserve such protection.</p>
<p>One thousand six hundred and eighty people signed a <a href="http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/savenyclgbtcenter/signatures" target="_blank">petition</a> to the Center on behalf of “Queers for Palestine.” Like Tony Kushner and his <a href="http://www.phyllis-chesler.com/990/cuny-trustees-honor-anti-israel-playwright" target="_blank">CUNY supporters</a>, the aggressors first claim victimhood and protest the denial of their free speech rights; then, they “surge” forward as a mob (on petitions, on the Internet, on the streets, on other battlefields), to either murder Jews or to honor those Jews who hate Israel, and to silence gay Jews who are pro-Israel.</p>
<p>This is what happened at the LGBT Center last night.</p>
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		<title>Who Can Beat Obama?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/phyllis-chesler/who-can-beat-obama/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=who-can-beat-obama</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 27 May 2011 04:04:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Phyllis Chesler]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[In an era of symbolic identity politics, only one kind of candidate can trump Obama’s credentials.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/mystery1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-94475" title="mystery" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/mystery1.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="353" /></a></p>
<p>President Obama’s election is due, in part, to the desire among many American liberals and leftists to be seen as “atoning” for the sin of racism and the crimes of slavery. The fact that Obama is bi-racial—his mother was white—matters little since he looks like an African-American. Indeed, the President’s own writing focuses on his African, Muslim roots, especially because his Kenyan father abandoned both him and his mother.</p>
<p>In an era of symbolic identity politics and affirmative action, only one kind of candidate could trump Obama’s credentials and that would be an African-American <em>woman</em>. Only such a candidate could symbolically address the sin and crime of sexism as well as that of racism. Ironically, the first woman who ever ran in a major party primary for the American Presidency did so in  1972.  That was Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, whose parents immigrated from British Guiana and Barbados. In 2004, Senator Carol Moseley Braun, also an African-American woman, ran in a major party primary for the American Presidency. Both women failed in their bids.</p>
<p>Currently there are 31 African American men and 13 African-American women in Congress; there are no African-Americans in the Senate. In the past there have been only six such senators in American history. Currently, there are 18 women in the Senate. In all of American history a total of 39 women of all races, including the current 18,  have served as Senators.</p>
<p>Given how many Americans confuse voting for the Presidency with voting for an American Idol; given how good so many Americans feel that we have “overcome” and have elected an African-American as our President; given how deep, high, and wide emotions are running in terms of racism (which trumps sexism as an issue even among establishment feminists), clearly, obviously, the next election is ripe for an African-American woman candidate. Obviously, she can be as inexperienced as President Obama was as long as she is charismatic, charming, eloquent, glamorous, and well connected to Hollywood, the media, and the academy. .</p>
<p>Maybe Oprah should run.</p>
<p>She will never run against her “guy.”  Not a chance in Hell. (And I would never vote for her). But she represents the zeitgeist, what’s popular in America right now. And Obama has all the African-American hip-hop and rap artists and Hollywood stars sewn up tight. We can’t turn to them. Obama’s their “guy” too.</p>
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		<title>Tom Friedman: Bring Tahrir Square to Jerusalem</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/phyllis-chesler/tom-friedman-bring-tahrir-square-to-jerusalem/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=tom-friedman-bring-tahrir-square-to-jerusalem</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 26 May 2011 04:35:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Phyllis Chesler]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=94300</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Turning a blind eye to Jew-Hate and the gang-rape of infidels.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Mubaraks-true-colors.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-94315" title="Mubarak's-true-colors" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Mubaraks-true-colors.gif" alt="" width="375" height="283" /></a></p>
<p>This week, Tom Friedman more than earned his keep at <em>The New York Times</em> by essentially calling for the “non-violent” destruction of the Jewish State. I am not exaggerating. Wait until you read exactly what he’s written in his column: “Lessons From Tahrir Square.”</p>
<p>First, Friedman calls for a “Tahrir Square alternative” in terms of the Israel-“Palestine” impasse.</p>
<p>Tahrir Square? Did the man sleep through journalist Lara Logan’s mass gang rape there? Does he view such a mob as “peaceful” or “non-violent?” Does he not understand that the young Egyptian Wael Gonim has, perhaps unintentionally, paved the way for the far more organized Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists to assume power? Does Friedman actually believe that the Islamist factions at war with each other and with their overlords, chieftains, and dictators, are all engaged in “non-violent” social change?</p>
<p>Friedman does not focus on Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh, Libya’s Moammar Qaddafi or Bahrain’s King Hamad Bin Isa Al Khalifa —all of whom have been shooting down their own people in cold blood in the streets. He does not call for people of good will to “nonviolently” go and face these evil men down. No. Instead, listen to Friedman’s clarion call. He <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/opinion/25friedman.html?ref=opinion">suggests</a> that we should:</p>
<blockquote><p>Announce that every Friday from today forward will be ‘Peace Day,’ and have thousands of West Bank Palestinians march nonviolently to Jerusalem, carrying two things — an olive branch in one hand and a sign in Hebrew and Arabic in the other. The sign should say: ‘Two states for two peoples. We, the Palestinian people, offer the Jewish people a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders — with mutually agreed adjustments — including Jerusalem, where the Arabs will control their neighborhoods and the Jews theirs.&#8221;</p>
<p>If Palestinians peacefully march to Jerusalem by the thousands every Friday with a clear peace message, it would become a global news event. Every network in the world would be there. Trust me, it would stimulate a real peace debate within Israel — especially if Palestinians invited youth delegations from around the Arab world to join the marches, carrying the Saudi peace initiative in Hebrew and Arabic. Israeli Jews and Arabs should be invited to march as well. Together, the marchers could draw up their own peace maps and upload them onto YouTube as a way of telling their leaders what Egyptian youth said to President Hosni Mubarak: “We’re not going to let you waste another day of our lives with your tired mantras and maneuvering.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Alright, the man’s a regular Gandhi, hand him his dhoti (loincloth). However, why doesn’t Friedman also call for an international delegation to march to Sderot to serve as human shields against Hamas rockets? Why did he never call for thousands of peaceniks to “nonviolently” board Israeli buses during the heart of the Second Intifada &#8212; a new group of Freedom Riders to give innocent Israelis freedom from savage, bloody death? Why doesn’t Friedman call for Western supporters of the Arab Spring to swarm over Syria’s or Libya’s borders holding signs calling for Assad’s and Qaddafi’s ouster?</p>
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		<title>The Ten State Solution: An Idea Whose Time Has Come</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/phyllis-chesler/the-ten-state-solution-an-idea-whose-time-has-come/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-ten-state-solution-an-idea-whose-time-has-come</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 24 May 2011 04:05:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Phyllis Chesler]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=94024</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why has everyone been thinking so small? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/There-is-another-way.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-94067" title="There-is-another-way" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/There-is-another-way.gif" alt="" width="375" height="286" /></a></p>
<p>In the news, on the street, at international conferences, and in classrooms galore, everyone is talking about the “two state solution” as if it signified the Second Coming. People who have never been to Israel, or to Ramallah, who own no military maps of the region, and who do not know a single Palestinian, all, every last one, monotonously intones this phrase.</p>
<p>President Obama, talked about the eternal, infernal two state solution or about “two states for two peoples.” Even Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, now says it <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/world/middleeast/06palestinians.html" target="_blank">favors a two-state solution</a>. Prime Minister Netanyahu implicitly but not explicitly supports a “two-state solution.”</p>
<p>I loved how Prime Minister Netanyahu stood up to President Obama when he firmly and clearly declared that the time for illusions—the kind that is always written in Jewish blood—is now officially over.</p>
<p>But why is everyone thinking so “small?” My colleague and friend, Dr. Mordechai Kedar, a lecturer in the Department of Arabic at Bar Ilan University and a research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, has a far more realistic and creative <a href="http://www.youngisrael.org/content/PDFs/Viewpoint/Fall_2010/VPFall2010.pdf" target="_blank">suggestion</a>. When I first heard his proposal, I laughed. I thought: “Surely, this is some kind of Jewish joke.”</p>
<p>His suggestion is no joke. In fact, it has some serious support from both Israelis and Palestinians. Of course, things being what they are, no one will go on record supporting this idea, which is based on a sociological and historical analysis of Arab tribes and the consequent concept of Arab tribal city-states.</p>
<p>Dr. Kedar proposes the creation of no less than eight or nine independent and separate Arab city-states within the West Bank, in addition to Gaza. Of course, Israel would comprise the ninth or tenth state. He writes:</p>
<p>“There is no reason to assume that a Palestinian state will not become another failing Arab state, due to the fragmented society in the West Bank and Gaza, tribalism and lack of awareness of nationhood as demonstrated by the failing performance of the Palestinian authority since its establishment in 1994…Social stability is the key for political stability&#8230;the only successful model for an Arab state is the one which is based on a single consolidated traditional group such as each of the individual Arab Gulf Emirates.”</p>
<p>This actually makes sense. The Arab Gulf Emirates have been relatively successful because their inhabitants are, with some exceptions, largely homogeneous in terms of tribe, ethnicity, and religion. True, the oil wealth has also provided an incentive for unity. But in general, the Arab Middle East has always been composed of many tribes, religions, sects, and ethnic groups, all at war with each other and with the government. The colonial imposition of a central, western-style nation-state has not served the interests of the indigenous people but rather the interests of dictators and large corporations.</p>
<p>Thus, according to Dr. Kedar, there is essentially one tribe that “governs” (the hearts and minds in) Ramallah, another tribe entirely which does so in Nablus, yet another which presides over Jenin, etc. A small city-state might be able to become productive and join a confederation of similar city-states. After all, size alone does not determine the success or failure of a state. For example, Monaco, Lichtenstein, and Luxembourg are small states with a high quality of life, while Algeria, Libya, and Sudan are large states with poor quality of life. According to Dr. Kedar:</p>
<p>“The towns that will receive independence (from both the Palestinian Authority and Israel) are Hebron (the Arab part), Jericho, Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, Tul-karem and Qalqilya…Bethlehem will require further consideration.” (In other writings, Dr. Kedar sometimes includes Bethlehem and questions Jericho).</p>
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		<title>Muslim Mothers Who &#8220;Honor Kill&#8221; Their Daughters</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/phyllis-chesler/muslim-mothers-who-honor-kill-their-daughters/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=muslim-mothers-who-honor-kill-their-daughters</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 18 May 2011 04:24:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Phyllis Chesler]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=93377</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Islamic penalty in India for marrying Hindu men. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"> </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"> </span></p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/honor_killings.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-93381" title="honor_killings" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/honor_killings.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="321" /></a></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;">Two Muslim mothers, both widows, both living in Uttar Pradesh in India, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2-mothers-kill-their-2-newly-married-daughters-in-honor-killings-in-northern-india/2011/05/15/AFAZny3G_story.html" target="_blank">helped each other murder</a> their grown daughters, Zahida, 19, and Husna, 26, for having committed the crime of marrying Hindu men. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"> </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;">They held their daughters down and slowly strangled them to death. The poor dead darlings actually believed they were entitled to marry non-Muslim men and for “love,” and that ultimately their mothers and Muslim community would accept them back. This is typical of many honor killing victims. While these two young women knew enough to contact the police for help—and the police actually got their mothers to sign an agreement that they would not “harm” their children—it was only a deceptive piece of paper. But the daughters’ longing for reconciliation and naive hopefulness was their undoing. Their mothers agreed not to hurt them and sweet-talked them into returning; once the girls were home, they became prey for the kill. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"> </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;">But life without a family network is unthinkable for someone whose identity is not individual but rather located in a collectivity. Progress and “modernity” may be coming to India, but slowly, very slowly.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"> </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;">Neither mother, Khatun or Subrato, has expressed the slightest remorse. Both feel justified because their daughters <a href="http://www.indianexpress.com/news/turned-over-to-kin-after-elopement-baghpat-women-killed-by-mothers/790613/0" target="_blank">brought shame to their families</a>. According to the police, Khatun said: “We killed them because they brought shame to our community. How could they elope with Hindus? They deserved to die. We have no remorse.”</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"> </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;">This is cold-hearted, barbaric, almost unbelievable. But such Muslim-on-Muslim crimes and woman-on-woman crimes are typical in many parts of the world. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"> </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;">Clearly, this is an extreme case of woman’s inhumanity to woman; I published a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Womans-Inhumanity-Woman-Phyllis-Chesler/dp/1556529465/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1305570152&amp;sr=1-1" target="_blank">book</a> with that title. We expect women, mothers especially, to be able to defy social custom for the sake of saving their children. The reality is just the opposite. The slightest transgression, especially by women, will upset huge networks and topple all social stability. No one will marry someone from a “shamed” family; that family will be forever ostracized, impoverished, and may also die out genetically. Mothers, fathers, relatives are loyal to their tribal social customs rather than to any one individual, even if that individual is their own child. The system itself demands and allows for such barbarism—but the sacrifice of the individual is seen as in the service of the greater tribal and caste based social structure or “civilization.” </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"> </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;">In addition, woman’s inhumanity to woman is a common phenomenon in India where mothers-in-law routinely assist their sons in burning their daughters-in-law to death. This is known as a “dowry killing” because it is done so that a new bride can bring another dowry into the impoverished and/or greedy family. There is actually a special <a href="http://www.phyllis-chesler.com/867/universal-doctrine-of-human-rights" target="_blank">wing in a prison in New Delhi</a> for such mothers-in-law. In addition, female infanticide was a long-time practice in both India and China. Both women and men steal children in India and sell them to be adopted abroad or, more frequently, to be groomed into sexual slavery either at home or abroad. A dear friend is visiting me from India right now and her stories on this subject are unbelievable &#8212; and yet all too believable. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"> </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;">Surveys have shown us that women in India believe that women deserve to be beaten. Perhaps they are also saying that women should simply expect this to happen. Many Hindu and Muslim mothers refuse to accept severely battered child-daughter brides back into their home. In Afghanistan, this often leads to suicide, often self-immolation as well. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"> </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;">To its credit, the Indian Supreme Court has recently <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-13348414" target="_blank">declared</a> that &#8220;It is time to stamp out these barbaric, feudal practices which are a slur on our nation.&#8221; </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"> </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;">Once again, the major mainstream media in the United States have, thus far, failed to do any original stories about this awful case. The <em><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2-mothers-kill-their-2-newly-married-daughters-in-honor-killings-in-northern-india/2011/05/15/AFAZny3G_story.html" target="_blank">Washington Post</a></em> relied again on an AP story. The <em>New York Times</em> has neither published nor posted anything. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"> </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;">In the past, the <em>Washington Post</em> has <a href="http://pajamasmedia.com/phyllischesler/2010/05/26/why-is-the-washington-post-afraid-to-use-the-words-%E2%80%9Cmuslim%E2%80%9D-and-%E2%80%9Chonor-killing%E2%80%9D-in-the-same-article/" target="_blank">only covered Hindu honor killings in India</a>. This time, they were forced to use the word “Muslim” to identify the perpetrators. The victims were not identified as “Muslims.” </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"> </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;">That only happens when Israelis or Americans have killed them. </span></p>
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		<title>Was Osama a Typical Husband and Father?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/phyllis-chesler/was-osama-a-typical-husband-and-father/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=was-osama-a-typical-husband-and-father</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 04 May 2011 04:30:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Phyllis Chesler]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[father]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[innocent men women]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Laden]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mass murderer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[moammar qaddafi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muslim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[muslim citizens]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Osama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[point blank range]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Son]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=92234</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Jihadists and their women.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/osamaw.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-92239" title="osamaw" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/osamaw.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="272" /></a></p>
<p>Announcing the successful assassination of Osama Bin Laden on May 1, 2011, President Obama declared that the United States is “not – and never will be – at war with Islam….our war is not against Islam. Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader, he was a mass murderer of Muslims. Indeed, Al Qaeda has slaughtered scores of Muslims in many countries, including our own.”</p>
<p>In that same speech, Obama stated that “Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader” because, according to Obama, by definition, a (good) Muslim cannot be a “mass murderer of Muslims.” But this is simply not true. Muslims specialize in murdering other Muslims all the livelong day. Think of Iran’s record. Think of Lebanon. Think of the way Muslim leader Moammar Qaddafi has been shooting down his own Muslim citizens at point blank range.  Think of Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabian and Bahraini leaders shooting down Shia Muslim Bahrainis.</p>
<p>When the president of the United States singled out Muslims as victims Sunday night, why did he not pause to briefly mention, even in passing, the fact that Muslims and Islamists have also slaughtered non-Muslim victims: infidels, Jews, Christians, Hindus, etc.? Prick us, will we not bleed? Do our deaths count for nothing?</p>
<p>In his opening remarks on 5/1, Obama noted that bin Laden was responsible for the murder of thousands of “innocent men, women, and children.” This was Obama’s only mention of women. However, Americans were reviled at the many early media accounts and statements from officials following the assassination which reported that, when confronted by the Navy Seals, bin Laden used a woman, one of his wives, as a “human shield.” <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/05/03/press-briefing-press-secretary-jay-carney-532011">Updated reports</a> suggest that this particular wife was not used as a shield, but that she herself rushed the U.S. assaulter and was shot in the leg, but  not killed.</p>
<p>Whatever the case, this woman was acting, directly or indirectly, as a human shield for Osama. And this heinous behavior, to have a woman die before or instead of you, is not only typical of bin Laden, but typical of many Muslim Islamist and jihadic men.</p>
<p>Muslim men often give Muslim women who were otherwise slated to be honor murdered one last chance to go out in glory—as long as they blow up Israelis, Jews, Americans, infidels with them. These mass murderers—these serial killers by proxy&#8211;have trained veiled Muslim women to blow themselves up in public squares and mosques, where other veiled Muslim women and babies are shopping. Their handlers, who are not always men, are, in a sense, hiding behind them too. Such women, especially the wives of jihadists, are trained to be very aggressive in the service of protecting their Man. I do not know whether Osama “forced” his wife to rush at the American soldiers or whether the nature of their relationship simply consisted of such one-sided female devotion-unto-death.</p>
<p>In <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Growing-Up-bin-Laden-Osamas/dp/0312560168" target="_blank">Growing Up Bin Laden</a>, </em>Osama’s first wife/first cousin, Najwa bin Laden, and his fourth son, Omar bin Laden, (Najwa’s son too), reveal Osama’s monstrous but rather typical behavior vis-a-vis women and children, including his own.</p>
<p>Bin Laden, the holy warrior, had four-five wives (Najwa Ghanem, Khadijah Sharif, Khairiah Sabar, Siham Sabar, and Amal Al-Sadah who replaced his annulled fifth marriage and/or his divorced wife, Khadijah Sharif). Osama fathered eleven sons and eight daughters (nineteen children), ten with Najwa alone. According to Najwa and Omar, Osama was not physically cruel to his wives. He never beat them or raised his voice to them. They were chosen for their submissiveness, passivity, and religiosity. Typically, like many Arab and Muslim men, Osama loved his mother; he may even have identified with her as a kindred outcast. His first wife, Najwa, was his mother’s niece. He and Najwa lived with Osama’s mother, Allia, for a long time.</p>
<p>To Osama, women were important as breeders and domestic servants but otherwise they did not really matter, they were not important. He spent most of his time with other men, warriors, or businessmen. His first wife was fifteen years old. Osama expected a wife to “know her place.” He expected his four wives to live in purdah (to observe the strictest Saudi or Afghan style face and body coverings). Despite his enormous wealth, Osama condemned his wives to very primitive living conditions, and essentially expected them to work as domestic beasts of burden. He never concerned himself with their comfort and forced them to live in austere settings with little furniture. However, his relationship to Najwa was one of mutual understanding and tenderness.</p>
<p>Still, according to her son and co-author, Omar, even when Najwa was suffering from a difficult pregnancy, “she lived without air-conditioning in the hottest weather, without proper heating in the coldest weather, without modern appliances to store or book food or wash her family’s clothes, without proper food for her children, without medical care for anyone and without a way of communicating with her mother and siblings.”</p>
<p>Najwa never complained and maintained the “sweetest composure.”</p>
<p>Osama the mighty warrior could or would not live for long without his women and children with him. He took them along into danger and privation. He dragged all his wives and children along with him, first to Saudi Arabia, then into exile, in Sudan, and Afghanistan where he literally demanded that they live in a cave. Najwa left Afghanistan two days before 9/11. At least one wife, probably his fifth wife Amal, stayed with him and accompanied him to Pakistan. She is the one who may have functioned as his “human shield” in his final confrontation with American Navy Seals.</p>
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		<title>Lara Logan in Her Own Words</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 02 May 2011 04:22:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Phyllis Chesler]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[female rape victims]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[frenzied mob]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[israeli reservists]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lara logan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mainstream]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mob]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muslim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sake]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[violence]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[western mainstream media]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=91847</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A refusal to call what happened by its rightful name.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/lara-logan-60-minutes.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-91850" title="lara-logan-60-minutes" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/lara-logan-60-minutes.gif" alt="" width="375" height="303" /></a></p>
<p>I just watched Lara Logan on CBS’s <em>Sixty Minutes</em>. She was blonde, beautiful, brave, tearful, soft-spoken, strong, clear, eloquent, still obviously traumatized (who wouldn’t be?) &#8212; and yet, although she has been praised for “breaking the silence” about the sexual violence that afflicts female or foreign journalists in the field, Logan was still careful not to use the words “Muslim” or “Islam.” She still refused to characterize what happened to her as “barbaric.”</p>
<p>In her own words: She said that two to three hundred pairs of hands, one after the other, grabbed at her breasts, crotch and behind, and kept raping her non-stop from the back and the front. The mob had torn off all her clothing and the more she screamed the more excited they became. When someone yelled that she was an “Israeli, a Jew,” the frenzied mob turned murderous. They continued to beat her with flagpoles and sticks. They tried to tear her apart, limb from limb. They were tearing her muscles in every direction. They tried to tear her scalp off her skull. They were inside her everywhere. She believed that not only was she going to die but that she would die a long, slow, torturous death.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p>This went on for 25 minutes.</p>
<p>I would call this “barbaric,” “monstrous,” a lynching-in-the-making.</p>
<p>Logan did not. She reminded me of so many Western mainstream media talking heads who kept showing the bloody and barbaric footage of the lynching of two Israeli reservists in the police station (!) of Ramallah—but who failed to draw back in horror, refused to call what they were showing by its rightful name: Abhorrent. A lynching.  A human rights atrocity.  A war crime.</p>
<p>Logan at least wept a little.</p>
<p>Then, like so many female rape victims, she tried to blame herself or imagine that she had the power to save herself. Logan said “I can’t believe I (would) just let them kill me. How could (she) do this?&#8221; She had to fight—not for her own sake, women are still not trained to do that—but for the sake of her two young children. She said: “I came so close to actually abandoning them.” Logan’s “fight” consisted of understanding that all she had to do was “survive.”</p>
<p>On camera, Logan still does not really blame the mob of men, the mob of Egyptian <em>Muslim</em> men to be specific.</p>
<p>But, as in so many female war-zone encounters, luck saved her. The Muslim male mob stumbled past a camp of completely veiled Egyptian women (only their eyes showed). One woman put her arms around Logan and the other women closed ranks around her. Now, the shameless, cowardly male mob would have had to physically or sexually assault “one of their own.” It was no longer just about Logan. Meanwhile, Logan’s all-male television team had persuaded the Egyptian police to try to rescue her and they did so at the last moment. The police had to beat the mob back, get her into a tank, fly her back to the United States where her sore muscles, cuts, and internal wounds and bruises required four days of hospitalization.</p>
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		<title>Justice Served in an American-Islamic Honor Killing</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/phyllis-chesler/can-a-father-get-away-with-honor-killing-his-daughter-in-america/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=can-a-father-get-away-with-honor-killing-his-daughter-in-america</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 15 Apr 2011 17:30:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Phyllis Chesler]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[American]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cherokee jeep]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[diabetes medicine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Faleh]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[heathrow airport]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[khalaf]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[law]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[murder]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[origin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[second degree murder]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Faleh Almaleki is sentenced to 34½ years in Arizona for murdering  his daughter Noor.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/noor-al-maleki.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-90536" title="noor-al-maleki" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/noor-al-maleki.gif" alt="" width="375" height="286" /></a></p>
<p>Arizona Judge Roland Steinle has just sentenced Faleh Almaleki to 34½ years in prison. According to <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&amp;safe=off&amp;tbo=1&amp;tbm=mbl&amp;q=almaleki&amp;aq=f&amp;aqi=p-p1g6g-v3&amp;aql=&amp;oq=">live reporting</a> from the courtroom, the judge noted that Almaleki showed no remorse after the murder, that he did not forgive his daughter, that he did what suited his own purpose. The judge also said this was the hardest case he had to face in his six years on the bench. He found no mitigating factors and sentenced Almaleki to 34 and 1/2 years: 15 years for the aggravated assault of Khalaf, 3 and 1/2 years for leaving the scene of an accident, and 16 years for the second-degree murder of his daughter. He was facing a maximum total of 46 years.</p>
<p>Thus, today we have witnessed Iraqi-American Faleh Almaleki <a href="http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2011/04/14/20110414glendale-man-convicted-honor-killing-sentencing.html">being sentenced</a> in Phoenix, Arizona for having honor murdered his 20-year-old daughter Noor and for having attempted to murder Amal Khalaf, the woman who was trying to protect her. In October of 2009, he followed the daughter, whom he had tormented all her life, to a shopping mall, lurked outside, then boldly ran over her precious, lovely body with a two-ton Cherokee jeep. He also tried to run Amal Khalaf down and managed to injure her seriously. Then he fled. Faleh flew to England via Mexico, but was arrested at Heathrow Airport and sent back for trial.</p>
<p>He made his escape with the help of his wife, Seham, Noor’s mother, and his son, Ali. Seham made sure Faleh had his diabetes medicine with him; perhaps she packed a little bag for him too.  Seham was no kinder to Noor than her father was. Seham cursed Noor on a regular basis and made life at home so impossible that Noor left. She moved in with the sympathetic Amal, whose son, Marwan, Noor may have begun to date. Seham soon cursed the woman who dared give Noor shelter.</p>
<p>What exactly was Noor’s crime? She had refused to remain in an arranged marriage in Iraq. She wanted to live in America, not Iraq. Noor also insisted on dressing like a modern, American girl—worse, she dared to choose her own boyfriend, another Iraqi-American. In her family’s eyes, she was a “whore,” a “disobedient” daughter who deserved to die. Their honor depended on her death.</p>
<p>Noor is not the first young girl who has been honor murdered in the United States. Daughter-stalking, daughter-monitoring, and daughter-killing by the family of origin is one of the distinguishing features of a classic honor killing. This is very different from American domestically violent femicide, which usually targets wives who are murdered by husbands who commit the crime alone, not with the assistance of their own families of origin or with the victim’s family of origin. (This is sometimes the case in honor killings.) Battered wife-murder in America is not usually an expression of a family “conspiracy plot,” nor are such killers seen as heroes.</p>
<p>Faleh Almaleki was convicted of second-degree murder, aggravated assault, and two counts of fleeing the scene of a serious-injury accident. He claimed that it was all “accidental,” that he only meant to drive past his daughter and spit at her. He claimed that he lost control of the car.</p>
<p>I cannot imagine what it might be like growing up in a family and in a culture where you know, in advance, that your own parents, brothers, sisters, first cousins, and uncles might be the ones who will one day kill you. I would think that “trust” and “intimacy” would be difficult and that paranoia, based on reality, would run rampant.</p>
<p>I do not believe that most Americans understand how profoundly different a shame and honor culture is from our own. I do know that the media has consistently misled American readers about what an honor killing is and who commits most honor killings in America, Canada, and Europe. Based on my 2010 <a href="http://www.meforum.org/2646/worldwide-trends-in-honor-killings">study</a>, it is clear that 91% of all honor killings in the West are committed by Muslims. Yes, Hindus and Sikhs commit the rest, but otherwise, they confine their honor killings to India and do not export them to the West. It is not relevant whether Islam, Sharia law, pre-Islamic tribal customs, a misunderstanding of either tribal law or Islam are responsible for such murders. What is relevant is that leading Islamic religious and political figures have not abolished such crimes or excommunicated such murderers.</p>
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		<title>Vive la Burqa?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/phyllis-chesler/vive-la-burqa/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=vive-la-burqa</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 12 Apr 2011 04:43:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Phyllis Chesler]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=90197</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Not gender apartheid, but a face-veil ban draws women to the streets of Paris to protest. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Picture-31.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-90202" title="Picture-3" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Picture-31.gif" alt="" width="375" height="295" /></a></p>
<p>Women are fighting in the streets of Paris. Alas, they are not fighting against Islamic gender apartheid—they are not protesting arranged marriage or honor killings. Instead, they are fighting for the right to veil their faces. On April 11<sup>th</sup>, two veiled women were <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/04/11/france-bans-face-covering-islamic-veil-1300456722/">arrested</a> for participating in an illegal demonstration about this issue. Sixty-one people were arrested for the same reason this past weekend. It is the 21<sup>st</sup> century, and people are protesting the French government’s <a href="http://www.meforum.org/2787/france-ban-the-burqa">ban against the niqab and burqa</a> (full-face veil) which just went into effect.</p>
<p>Vive La France!</p>
<p>It is important to note that France has not banned the headscarf (hijab) and that the French ban is not specific to Islam. The French law is ethnicity- and religion-neutral and refers only to a generic “face-covering.” In 2004, France became the first European country to legally restrict all religious clothing in public schools: veils, visible Christian crosses, Jewish skullcaps, and hijab were forbidden in public schools.</p>
<p>What does this ban mean for the West?</p>
<p>The burqa is not a friendly garment. Surely, wearing a headscarf and dressing modestly would constitute a far friendlier face of Islam in the West. And, a more egalitarian face as well. Muslim men, both religious and secular, wear modern, Western clothing. Why do Muslim women alone have to bear the burden of representing 7<sup>th</sup> century Islam? Why is Paris, of all places, looking more and more like Mecca, Teheran, or Kabul? Hasn’t just such “multi-culturalism” been pronounced a failure by many European leaders?</p>
<p>There was a time in my life when France symbolized the quintessential drop-dead gorgeous most bohemian, most artistic, surely the most liberated, and the best of all possible expatriate lives. I wanted to live in Paris and &#8220;be bad.&#8221; I wanted to smoke (which I have never done), stay up all night, attend the salons, the art exhibitions, the opera, the theatre. I admit it: I wanted to be a…French-style revolutionary.</p>
<p>Years later, I came to understand that the French Revolution was a very bloody affair and that a true <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror">reign of terror</a> soon followed it. I also learned that the rights of “man” did not necessarily include the rights of “woman.” Worse was to follow. I learned that the American expatriates Gertude Stein and Alice B. Toklas lived safely in the French countryside during WWII mainly because they had a Nazi protector.</p>
<p>Nice going, girls.</p>
<p>And then I learned that Simone de Beauvoir-the-great-feminist had functioned, quite literally, as Jean-Paul Sartre’s <a href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/628591/blood-on-their-hands.thtml">pimp</a> and that neither of these self-styled French resistance fighters had actually risked very much or saved Jewish lives.</p>
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		<title>The Goldstone Recantation</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/phyllis-chesler/the-goldstone-recantation/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-goldstone-recantation</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 04 Apr 2011 04:20:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Phyllis Chesler]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=89499</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The anti-Israel jurist retracts his lies about the Jewish State, but is it too late to undo the damage? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/552912.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-89501" title="552912" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/552912.gif" alt="" width="375" height="280" /></a></p>
<p>Sometime Friday night, April 1, 2011, which was also the Jewish Sabbath, the Washington Post published, online, a rather remarkable <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/reconsidering_the_goldstone_report_on_israel_and_war_crimes/2011/04/01/AFg111JC_story.html?wprss=rss_opinions">op-ed piece</a> by South African jurist Richard Goldstone. Essentially, Goldstone recanted his own “Goldstone Report,” a document which has been used against Israel in countless, damaging ways, a document which accuses Israel of possible “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” in its incursion into Gaza in response to the 10,000 rockets Hamas launched towards Israeli civilians in Sderot and southern Israel—a document which charges Israel with having “purposely targeted civilians in Gaza.”</p>
<p>Goldstone now admits that all the above charges are wrong, false, are based on too-little-information or on flawed-information. He partly blames Israel for not “co-operating” with the venomously biased Human Rights Council, but in truth, Goldstone really had available much of the information which is now contained in Israel’s painfully careful investigation of what happened in Gaza.</p>
<p>Israel looked into the false allegations that it had “targeted civilians” and investigated itself thoroughly. Of course, although Goldstone also charged Hamas with this same task—Hamas did not do so. Now, rather late in the day, Goldstone has finally noted that there are actually some important differences between an open, transparent, lawful, ethical, and democratic Jewish state and an Islamist-terrorist organization such as Hamas.</p>
<p>One wonders: Why is Goldstone recanting? And, if he is, indeed, recanting, why does he still hold back, why does he still not admit all that is known about the truth? But that is a question for another day. (I am sure that some Jewish leftists will insist that Goldstone was death-threatened by the Zionist Lobby, or could no longer bear his pariah status. Indeed, such articles have already appeared, long before this recantation. I doubt such cult leaders will pay attention to Israel’s careful documentation.</p>
<p>Here’s my concern: Once the genie is out of the bottle, once a lie has made the rounds, there is no stopping it, no way of taking it back. The damage is done. It is rarely reversible. As a psychologist, I know that “first impressions” are very powerful and almost impossible to change by introducing facts, studies, or logic.</p>
<p>Thus, like a rocket, once a Blood Libel is launched, it’s done its work. If, a year or two later, one carefully documents that the entire matter (the false allegation that the Israelis murdered Mohammed al-Dura, the false allegation that the IDF committed a massacre in Jenin, the false allegation that Israelis were purposely shooting at civilians in Gaza) was nothing but Big Fat Black-hearted Lies, most people have already moved on, their blood streams permanently altered, poisoned with Jew-hatred.</p>
<p>The number of Human Rights groups, NGOs, the United Nations, Muslim governments, the world media, that have relied on the Goldstone Report to further delegitimize Israel are as countless as the stars. That includes the UN Human Rights Council, which issued the hateful, lying document; all the supposed human rights groups (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B’Tzelem, Al Haq, The New Israel Fund) that relied upon it; all the Jewish left-liberals and their patron handler, George Soros, (J Street); all the media and publishing outlets that found in Goldstone’s flawed document justification for their one-sided anger against the Jewish State.</p>
<p>I live in Manhattan. I read every Manhattan-based hard copy newspaper as well as 30-50 other newspapers online. Daily. Hard copy reveals certain things that online versions disappear. For example, let’s consider how Sunday’s New York Times (April 3, 2011) presents the Goldstone recantation.</p>
<p>Here’s how:</p>
<p>The frontpage features a four column color photo which is captioned: “Palestinians prayed near Israeli soldiers on Friday. They were protesting land confiscation in the village of Qusra, near Nablus.&#8221;</p>
<p>One wonders how a prayer service can also be a “protest.” Wonder no more. It is what Muslims do. Far worse is what inflamed Muslims and Islamists do immediately after their peaceful prayer service. Think of the twenty United Nations workers in Afghanistan who have just been murdered by raging post-mosque mobs fired up by their mullahs about the unfortunate burning of a Quran in Florida. Burning a holy book may indeed be “disrespectful;” murdering, be-heading a whole, living human being is even more “disrespectful” both to that living being and to God-the-Creator as well.</p>
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		<title>Anti-Israel Agitprop on the Silver Screen</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/phyllis-chesler/anti-israel-agitprop-on-the-silver-screen/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=anti-israel-agitprop-on-the-silver-screen</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Mar 2011 04:17:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Phyllis Chesler]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=89114</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A new film "Miral" twists history and facts to demonize the Jewish State. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/miral-movie1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-89161" title="miral-movie" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/miral-movie1.jpg" alt="" width="458" height="610" /></a></p>
<p>Great works of art can persuade people to believe that a lie is true, that good is evil, and that evil is good.</p>
<p>For example, the film <em>Paradise Now</em>, which I <a href="http://www.phyllis-chesler.com/150/murder-lies-and-videotape">reviewed</a> in these pages more than five years ago, is a brilliant piece of propaganda whose aim was—and still is—to support a (false) Palestinian “narrative” over and above its true Israeli counterpart. It is a powerful film, but one which does not serve the cause of truth so much as that of propaganda.</p>
<p>Director Hany Abu-Assad’s Israelis are all soldiers: ominous, hard-eyed, helmeted, armed, and in tanks. They are depersonalized and demonized. There are no exceptions.</p>
<p>On the other hand, Abu-Assad portrays even Palestinian <em>suicide killers</em> as soulful and compassionate. They are made to seem western, or “just like us.” Abu-Assad’s only female character is completely fictional, but that is why we &#8220;like” her. She dresses in a modern, sexy way, lives alone (this is not possible), and is a European-style “pacifist.”</p>
<p>The Big Lies never stop coming—packaged pleasantly, believably. Abu-Assad’s two sympathetic suicide killers tell outright lies: that Israel has consistently rejected a two-state solution when, in fact, it is the Palestinians who have; and that Jewish Israelis, not Muslim Arabs, have carried out “programs of ethnic cleansing.”</p>
<p>Omissions are as important as what is said. There are no bloody Israeli civilian body parts strewn about, no screams, no life-long pain. The film completely omits the fact that Muslim Arabs, including Palestinians, are continuously indoctrinated to hate both Jews and Israelis who, they have been told, poison the water, kill Muslim babies to use their blood for Jewish ritual purposes, harvest Palestinian organs, etc.</p>
<p>In Carmen bin Ladin’s book<em> </em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Kingdom-Life-Saudi-Arabia/dp/0446694886/ref=tmm_pap_title_0"><em>Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia</em></a>, she describes the indoctrination of her 7-year old daughter in Saudi Arabia:</p>
<blockquote><p>When Wafah was seven or eight, I remember, I looked through her exercise book one evening and I found she’d written down, &#8220;I hate Jews. I love Palestine,&#8221; in her childish Arabic script. What was happening to my daughter. If she was going to hate somebody, I wanted her to have a good reason. The Arab-Israeli dispute was something she knew nothing about.</p></blockquote>
<p>In <em>Paradise Now</em>, on camera, a taxi driver tells his passenger that Israelis have polluted the drinking water with anti-spermicides—not so different from what Mrs. Suha Arafat said when she accused Israelis of causing cancer and fertility problems among Palestinian women.</p>
<p>This same Palestinian “narrative” drives the film <a href="http://www.amreeka.com/"><em>Amreeka</em></a>, which premiered at the Sundance film festival in 2009. The Israelis are all bad; we only see them as soldiers and always at checkpoints where they harass, mistreat, and terrorize innocent, sympathetic Palestinian civilians. Again, there are no exceptions. There are absolutely no good Israelis, no innocent Israeli children&#8211;nor are there any Palestinians, including the suicide killers and their handlers who are less than soulful, charming, and sympathetic.</p>
<p>When director Cherian Dabis’ heroine, Muna, a Christian Arab from Bethlehem, flees to America, she and her son find that <em>all</em> Americans are anti-Arab and anti-Muslim. Their arrival at the airport in Illinois is fraught with snapping German shepherd dogs and suspicious officials and results in the loss of all their cash. There is hardly a frame that goes by in which Muna does not recite her bitterness about being “occupied” by Israelis, about the “Wall” they are building, nor a frame in which she and her sister, brother-in-law, and eldest neice do not rail against the Americans for having invaded Iraq.</p>
<p>However, unlike <em>Paradise Now</em>, this film actually has three—but no more than three—American exceptions. One is a dope-smoking African-American teenager who can identify with Arabs in terms of “racist Americans,” one is a “freaky” high school dropout who understands that traditional Americans are the real moral “freaks,” the third is the adult son of Polish Jews who really understands what racism is about and who comes to Muna’s rescue. Otherwise, all the Americans shown are cruel, hateful, and dangerous. Post 9/11, they do not hire very qualified Arabs and they stop patronizing a physician because he is an Arab.</p>
<p>On March 27, 2011, CNN broadcast a so-called documentary <a href="http://newsone.com/nation/casey-gane-mccalla/cnns-unwelcome-the-muslims-next-door-shows-hate-that-hate-created/"><em>Not Wanted: The Muslim Next Door</em></a>, which repeated many of these specific stereotypes.  On camera, the Muslim men, including the imam, were all soft-spoken, soulful, compassionate, tearful, enormously likeable. There were absolutely no exceptions. No imam raged, yelled himself hoarse as so many do on satellite television. No southern Christian was presented as anything other than a relentless and violent bigot.</p>
<p>And now, we have <em>Miral, a </em>film which has garnered a huge amount of attention within a three-four day period in the New York area media. In interviews, the director, Julian Schnabel, defends his right to tell the Palestinian “narrative” for the first time. He seems not to know that many others before him have specialized in this particular line of work. But, people who do not know this may happily believe Schnabel. They may also believe that the same Israelis who are capable of alleged brutality towards Palestinians have, until Schnabel came alone, made sure that their version of the “narrative” is the only one out there.</p>
<p>What is the film about?</p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p><em>Miral</em> is based on the the lives of four Palestinian women. The film begins with the period just before Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948 and ends just before the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993. The women are Miral’s mother, Nadia, who was battered and raped either by her uncle, husband, or boyfriend and then jailed by the Israelis for hitting an Israeli woman. Thereafter, Nadia commits suicide by walking into the sea. Miral’s father or stepfather puts her in an orphanage. These facts are purposely vague, and therefore, presumably unimportant, certainly far less important in terms of trauma than the “Israeli occupation” or the all-powerful misery at the checkpoints.</p>
<p>The second woman is Hind al-Husseini, (whose story is presented first). She is the founder of the Dar Al-Tifel home for Palestinian orphans; the third woman is Miral, a young woman who is raised in the orphanage and who comes of age during the first Palestinian intifada ( 1987-1993);  the fourth woman, Fatima, is a female Palestinian terrorist who is serving three life sentences. Fatima blew up a movie theatre somewhere in Israel; she is Nadia’s prison friend. Fatima is presented as a sympathetic figure and as someone who once worked as a nurse in a hospital for injured Arab soldiers in 1967 when four Arab nations attacked Israel.</p>
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		<title>Forced Marriages in Our Own Backyard</title>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 17 Mar 2011 04:35:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Phyllis Chesler]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Think the barbaric practice doesn't happen in the U.S.? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a class="highslide" onclick="return vz.expand(this)" href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/california-girl-fled-to-escape-arranged-marriage_2011_630091-1.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-87950" title="california-girl-fled-to-escape-arranged-marriage_2011_630091-1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/california-girl-fled-to-escape-arranged-marriage_2011_630091-1.gif" alt="" width="375" height="298" /></a></p>
<p>On February 22, 2011, <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2011/mar/04/local/la-me-hesperia-girl-20110304">Jessie Bender</a>, a 13-year-old southern California girl, ran away from home. No, Jessie was not into “sex, drugs, or rock n’ roll.” On the contrary. Jessie was terrified that her American-born mother, Melissa, a convert to Islam, and her mother’s Pakistani boyfriend and acting stepfather Mohammed “Mo” Khan, had decided to send her to Pakistan to be married against her will. Had Jessie gone, her mother and “Mo” would have received $3000.00.</p>
<p>Initially, her mother told police that Jessie had been abducted by a Facebook predator. Melissa, in full hijab, made a tearful <a href="http://www.examiner.com/missing-persons-in-national/melissa-bender-speaks-about-missing-jessie-video">plea</a> for the television cameras.  &#8220;If you are holding my daughter, please let her go…Please, I beg you to let my daughter go. She&#8217;s just 13 years old.&#8221;</p>
<p>This tearful, public, pseudo-honesty reminds me of the <a href="http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=1820323">Afghan-Canadian</a> Safia family who wept in public, mourning their three dead honor murdered daughters: 13 year-old Geeti, 17 year-old Sahari, and 19-year-old Zainab, and Safia’s first wife, 50-year-old Rona Amir Mohammed. In a bid for sympathy, and to throw the police off their trail, the three murderers shed copious tears, grieving, loudly.</p>
<p>Jessie Bender’s mother went on television and lied about her daughter. Yes, it is true, Jessie had communicated with an adult male on Facebook, but that is not where she ran. Jessie’s uncle had hidden her at an Apple Valley motel. Within a week, it became clear that Jessie’s mother, Melissa, and her pseudo-stepfather “Mo, ” had both been lying. Melissa herself had visited Pakistan and may be seen in a <a href="http://www.examiner.com/missing-persons-in-national/exclusive-13-year-old-child-exploited-for-pakistan-arranged-marriage-for-3-000-photo-1">photo</a> smiling broadly, wearing very serious hijab and standing next to a turbaned tribal elder who is holding a gun. Possibly, she is also standing  next to “Mo.”</p>
<p><a href="http://pajamasmedia.com/phyllischesler/2008/05/18/still-dead-in-dallas-an-update-on-the-double-honor-murders/">Patricia “Tissy” Said</a> in Dallas, assisted her Egyptian-born husband Yasir who honor murdered their two daughters, Sarah and Amina, for refusing such arranged marriages.</p>
<p>Like Texas’s “Tissy” Said, California’s Melissa Bender also seems a bit…dim-witted, easy prey for a smart or charming Muslim man who wants (or needs) to bring his Pakistani brother over to America. “Mo’s” brother is, apparently, in some kind of trouble and has to get out of Dodge City pronto.</p>
<p>Yasir Said hatched a similar plan: He wanted to marry his American-born, American-citizen daughters off to hand-picked Egyptian men who would then be able to become American citizens. Whether Said was doing this for money, “honor,” or jihad is unknown. Tunisian-born Samia Labidi, who lives in France, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Other-Muslims-Moderate-Secular/dp/0230621880">describes</a> such marriages between under-age Western girls and older Muslim foreign men as part of a larger jihadic plan. This may not be true in the California Bender case, but it may be true in other cases.</p>
<p>And, by the way, “Tissy” Said herself married Yasir in Texas when she was only 14 years old. She did so with her father’s permission. I have no doubt that both she and her father believed that Yasir was the Sheikh of Araby and would provide for “Tissy” royally. Instead, he did what many Muslim Arab men do: He sent his wife out to work and lived off her pitiful earnings.</p>
<p>Melissa has <a href="http://www.examiner.com/missing-persons-in-national/exclusive-13-year-old-child-exploited-for-pakistan-arranged-marriage-for-3-000-photo-1">six children from six different fathers</a>. She has also lost custody of two children to their maternal grandmother. I do not justify her stupidity and cruelty but it is clear that she may not be in good mental or intellectual health. Nevertheless, her children are at her mercy.</p>
<p>Jessie was found hiding about 30 miles from her home. Since then, Jessie and her siblings have been in child protective custody.</p>
<p>An estranged family member confirms that Jessie indeed “was going to be married off to [the stepfather’s] brother over in Pakistan because he was in some trouble and they wanted to bring him over to the states.  They were going to get paid $3000 for this.”</p>
<p>It is common for Pakistani fathers to sell their young daughters into marriage in order to make a quick buck. Bride prices range from Rs. 80,000 to Rs. 200,000 (1,400-3,500 USD), and younger girls receive higher prices. For example, one ten-year-old Pakistani girl was sold into marriage by her father in order to settle an outstanding debt. According to <a href="http://asiapacific.amnesty.org/apro/aproweb.nsf/pages/svaw_childMarriages">Amnesty International</a>, a medical examination showed that she had been subjected to rape and torture. I am sure there are thousands of such cases throughout the Islamic world.</p>
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		<title>J’Accuse: Palestinians of War Crimes and Genocide</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/phyllis-chesler/j%e2%80%99accuse-palestinians-of-war-crimes-and-genocide/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=j%25e2%2580%2599accuse-palestinians-of-war-crimes-and-genocide</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 15 Mar 2011 04:02:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Phyllis Chesler]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Why are Israeli “settlers” demonized when it is Palestinian terrorists who commit war crimes?]]></description>
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<p>Palestinian and Arab propaganda has demonized Jewish settlers as illegal, fanatic, racist, violent, angry, and hell-bent on revenge. The mainstream media has followed suit and has consistently justified Palestinian terrorism against Israelis as caused by the “provocative” settlements. People consistently forget that Arabs were murdering Jewish civilians on a mass basis for fifty years before the Jewish state was born and then for an additional twenty years before Israel won the 1967 war of self-defense, long before there were “settlements.” The Arab murder of Israeli civilians continues to this day. Please see the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs <a href="http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Terrorism-+Obstacle+to+Peace/Palestinian+terror+before+2000/Which+Came+First-+Terrorism+or+Occupation+-+Major.htm">website</a> on “Which Came First – Terrorism or ‘Occupation’?”</p>
<p>The world’s mainstream media has downplayed the barbaric murder of <a href="http://www.myisrael.org.il/action/739">five innocent human beings</a>, including three children, in the Israeli town of Itamar and has focused, instead, on the fact that they lived in a “radical settlement.”</p>
<p>Yesterday’s <em>New York Times</em> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/world/middleeast/14israel.html">piece</a> is particularly shameful. The headline reads: “Israel to Step Up Pace of Construction in West Bank Areas.”<strong> </strong>Isabel Kershner does not use the word “terrorist.” Only in the eleventh paragraph of an eighteen paragraph piece do we learn that the “attackers” are “widely suspected of being Palestinians.” The article is mainly devoted to Israel’s decision to increase building within existing settlements in response to this pitiless act of terrorism.</p>
<p>I have only two things to say.</p>
<p>1) Once upon a time, in 1677 BCE, nearly four millennia ago, the Biblical Abraham bought a burial cave and field from the Hittites in a place that was then, and is still now, called “Hebron.” He paid top dollar for it too—lest anyone think that he stole it, just took it, or was willing to accept it as a gift. Abraham identified himself as a resident foreigner, (“ger” and “toshav”), a sojourner in the land.</p>
<p>We are all sojourners in God’s land. We live, we die. No one is eternal.</p>
<p>The Biblical Moses, a Jew, but adopted and brought up as a Prince of Egypt in Pharoah’s Palace, and the son-in-law of Midian’s High Priest, also identifies himself as a “stranger in a foreign land.” Wherever God’s intimate resides, he or she is a temporary stranger; their bodies may be mortal but their souls are divine, we both are&#8211;and are not&#8211;“from here,” we are not totally of this earth.</p>
<p>As God later explains in Leviticus (Vayikra), the land belongs to God; we, humanity, are only sojourning here for awhile.</p>
<p>Thus, I am disheartened at every conceivable level, by how people demonize the word “settler.” A settler is not a colonizer. A settler is not an occupier. A settler is a human being who settles and works the land in which he lives, or that has claimed him, or saved him—or where his ancestors once dwelled.</p>
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