Conference taveng::bagels

Palestinian Strongarm
=====================

Thursday, May 22 1997; Page A24
The Washington Post

THE PALESTINIAN Authority has found many ways to harm its own cause
during its brief existence, but few more damaging than yesterday's
arrest of Palestinian-American journalist Daoud Kuttab. Mr. Kuttab is
a U.S. citizen running a U.S.-funded television station on the West
Bank. His detention, and the authority's jamming of his network's
broadcasts, are certain to put Yasser Arafat's increasing despotism
squarely in the American public eye.

Mr. Kuttab's Al-Quds TV is trying to be a kind of Palestinian C-SPAN,
broadcasting unedited debates from the Palestinian Authority's
parliament -- hardly seditious stuff, you might think. But some
legislators there give speeches critical of Mr. Arafat; the official
Palestinian Broadcasting Corp. never shows those, giving air time
only to Mr. Arafat himself. Recently Mr. Kuttab discovered that the
official television company was jamming his broadcasts. When he
reported this discovery to Washington Post correspondent Barton
Gellman, he was arrested -- and Mr. Arafat kept right on blocking
the broadcasts.

The fact that Mr. Kuttab is a U.S. citizen of course does not make
his arrest any more repugnant than the authority's jailing and
torturing of other journalists, intellectuals and free thinkers. As
Fawaz Turki reported on these pages yesterday, 14 Palestinians have
died under torture by Palestinian Authority police. This march toward
a police state is doubly sad because it is so unnecessary: Mr. Arafat
assumed office with a popular mandate, broad international support
and an opportunity to prove that Arab democracy is not an oxymoron.

But Mr. Kuttab's arrest, if not morally worse, is certainly more
tactically stupid than many of the authority's other moves. At a time
when political smarts would suggest that Mr. Arafat should be playing
the role of spurned negotiating partner, he chooses instead to revive
and exacerbate all the old questions about himself.

co Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company

NO ENTRY FOR PA OFFICIALS
The American Consulate in Jerusalem has denied an entry visa to Feisal
Husseini, holder of the Jerusalem portfolio in the Palestinian Authority.
This, in protest of the arrest of American-citizen journalist Daoud
Kuttab by Palestinian security forces.  American sources have transmitted
messages to the PA that its members will not receive entry visas to the
United States until Kuttab is released.  A Palestinian civil rights
organization held a press conference yesterday in the Ambassador Hotel in
Jerusalem, purposely outside of PA jurisdiction.  The organization said
that the Palestinian human-rights situation is very severe, and that
citizens are illegally arrested, tortured, and held for months and even
years without being indicted.  In a statement, the organization placed
full responsibility for the situation on the head of Yasser Arafat, who
does not supervise the security forces and does not prevent them from
systematically violating civil rights.  

-Arutz Sheva News Service, Tuesday, May 27, 1997

re .2

Kuttab has been released.

>citizens are illegally arrested, tortured, and held for months ...

Sounds like another country in the region.

A Boston Globe editorial cartoon a few days ago showed a picture of
Benjamin Netanyahu trying to restore the peace talks saying "We have
ways of making them talk" while holding a book labelled "Israeli
Torture Manual" in his hand.

/john

    > Sounds like another country in the region.
    
    Yes it does.......  Syria, Iraq, .............
    
    John, congratulations on your new source of information  -  cartoons! 
    
    There are some really good anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli cartoons in the
    the Egyptian press.  They should be a good source of information. 
    
    Baruch

Though you may prefer cartoons, here's a Boston Globe article from a few
weeks back...

[Reprinted by IRIS with permission of the author]
http://www.netaxs.com/people/iris] 
========

(NO) DEMOCRACY IN ARAFATLAND
By Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe

Tuesday, May 6, 1997
   
Naim Salameh, a Palestinian lawyer in Gaza, was impressed by how 
seriously the Israeli legal system took an accusation of corruption against 
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A reporter for Israel's Channel One 
television station first leveled the allegation -- that Netanyahu had agreed 
to appoint an attorney general who would secure a plea bargain for an 
embattled political ally. Police investigated and recommended that the prime 
minister be charged with fraud and breach of trust. Eventually, Israel's top 
prosecutors dismissed the case for lack of evidence. But Salameh was struck 
by the freedom of Israeli journalists and amazed that the police could 
interrogate senior officials, up to and including the prime minister. 

According to Bassam Eid, a Palestinian human rights activist, Salameh 
wrote an article praising Israel's legal standards and wondering "when we 
will see such examples applied in Palestinian Authority territory." He sent 
his piece to the Gaza Lawyers Union for publication in its journal. Instead 
the article was given to the Palestinian attorney general, who promptly had 
Salameh arrested on charges of slandering the Palestinian Authority.

Applaud civil liberties, go to prison: democracy in Arafatland.

Reuters reported the Salameh story on Friday, May 2. It appeared a day 
later on Page A26 of The Washington Post. In most other news outlets, it 
didn't appear at all. Why not? If *Israel's* attorney general jailed a 
Palestinian lawyer because he called for more due process of law, it would be 
on front pages around the world. The imprisoned barrister would become an 
instant cause celebre. Foreign ministries would trip over one another in 
their rush to call for his release. So why isn't it news when Yasser Arafat's 
government locks up an innocent man on trumped-up slander charges?

Because from Arabs -- to be blunt -- no one expects anything different.

The Palestinian Authority, which now governs the Gaza Strip and every 
major Arab town in the West Bank, is just another Arab dictatorship, no 
better than the two-dozen others that shred human rights across the Near and 
Middle East. There are no civil rights in Arafatland, no freedom of speech, 
no right to petition for redress of grievances, no habeas corpus, no 
independent judiciary. Critics of Arafat or his top henchmen are routinely 
jailed for months without being charged. Fair trials are nonexistent. Judges 
know that if they rule against the government, they are likely to be forced 
off the bench and arrested -- or worse.

But the Palestinians are only Arabs, so nobody seems to care.

Let Israel announce plans to build some apartment houses in Har Homa, a 
barren tract in Jerusalem, and editorial pages everywhere erupt in outrage. 
European capitals blister with disapproval. The United Nations rushes into 
emergency session to condemn the Israeli affront. But let the Palestinian 
Authority resort to such "widespread use of torture and unlawful killings" 
that its citizens "are terrified of the security forces" -- to quote 
Amnesty International -- and no one loses a moment's sleep.

The double standard is gaping, but Israel has no cause to complain: It 
helped foster it. In their eagerness to promote the Oslo ``peace process'' 
with the PLO, former Israeli prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres 
were willing to ignore the human rights of ordinary Palestinians. Handing 
territory over to Arafat would curb terrorism, Rabin once asserted, because 
the PLO chief would "run affairs without the Supreme Court, without 
B'Tselem, without the bleeding hearts." (B'Tselem is an Israeli human-rights 
monitor that often assails Israel's treatment of Arabs.) In fact, terrorism 
has soared since Arafat acquired his own statelet. But the rest of Rabin's 
prediction, to the sorrow of the Palestinians, has proved all too true.

In Arafatland, power flows not from the people but from the barrel of an 
AK-47. Teachers who go on strike are rounded up by police. Students are 
warned in class that if they criticize the regime, their families will pay 
the price. The elected Legislative Council is powerless and without 
influence, disdained by Arafat and his confidants. (At one meeting, he cursed 
the council as "sons of whores" and stalked out of the chamber.)

Early on, the Palestinian Authority crushed the relatively free press 
that had existed under Israeli occupation. "The PA has managed," Nadav 
Haetzni reported in Commentary last October, "to terrorize virtually every 
Palestinian publisher, editor, and journalist." Some newspapers, such as the 
daily Al-Nahar, Arafat simply ordered closed until the publisher agreed to 
print what the regime wanted printed. "Those failing to knuckle under, like 
the opposition paper Al-Ummah, were physically attacked," Haetzni wrote. 
"Arafat's security forces first confiscated the newspaper's press plates and 
then burned down its offices."

What Arafat and the PLO have established in Gaza and the West Bank -- 
much as they did in southern Lebanon in the 1970s -- is a brutal thugocracy 
that rules by terror, violence, and extortion. With such an entity, Israel 
has no hope of making peace; to keep giving it more land is delusionary and 
suicidal.

Meanwhile, Naim Salameh rots in prison, one more victim of Arab 
despotism. If Western journalists and diplomats had real respect for Arabs, 
Salameh's plight would be known the world over. But for most reporters as for 
most government officials, Arabs are a lesser people, their human rights not 
really worth bothering about. So what if there's no democracy in Arafatland? 
There's no democracy anywhere else in the Arab world, either. And most of us, 
apparently, couldn't care less.
   
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for the Boston Globe.)

>-----------------------------------------------------------------
>Palestinian human rights group attacks PA 
>     
>By JON IMMANUEL
>-----------------------------------------------------------------
>A Palestinian human rights group on Monday accused the Palestinian
>Authority of human rights violations and introduced relatives of some of
>the victims at a press conference.
>     The Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group investigated 42 cases.
>Included in a 27-page report, called "The State of Human Rights in
>Palestine," was the charge that different PA security forces use torture
>to extract confessions, even when there is clear evidence that the
>tortured man could not have committed the crime of which he was accused.
>     In one case, a group of nine men were arrested in Khader, near
>Bethlehem, in last May and charged with several murders, including that of
>a man who was killed in October 1993.
>     Nabil Salah, one of the accused, was forced to confess to the murder,
>even though he had documentary proof from the International Committee of
>the Red Cross that he was in jail in Israel from 1991 to 1994.
>     Some of the nine were also accused of murdering another man for whose
>death the IDF had officially claimed responsibility. Bassem Eid, director
>of the PHRMG, who worked for the Israeli group B'tselem at the time, took
>testimony showing that the man was killed by an IDF undercover unit.
>     In February Justice Minister Freih Abu Medein said that the men would
>all be released within 48 hours, but they remain in Jericho jail.
>     One of the arrested men reported to relatives that during three
>months of interrogation, "they forced my head into a toilet and forced me
>to drink from it." 
>     Another was stripped naked in the office of Col. Washidi, of
>Bethlehem military intelligence, "where they tried to rape me, but my
>screams prevented them. They inserted a baton into my rectum. At that
>moment I signed the confession." 
>     Whipping with electric cables, being locked in a closet for days,
>being tied in painful positions are also common.
>     "The authority is not set in its ways, but goes back and forward,"
>Eid said. Journalists, he noted, "have been relatively safe since the
>beginning of the year, until last week," when Jerusalem journalist Daoud
>Kuttab was arrested. 
>     "The frequency of torture is less than before. But maybe the victims
>are afraid to file complaints," he said.
>     PA Attorney-General Khalid al-Qidrah responded to the report on
>Israel Radio's Arabic service. He denied there is systematic torture,
>"only individual acts," and accused Eid of "lies." 
>      1997 The Jerusalem Post

re .3 and others by the same person

Mr Covert,

I personally have found many of your notes in this notesfile truly offensive.

Knowing that you consider yourself a practicing Christian, and also of your
early education in Germany, I am wondering what it is that feeds your poisonous
venom against Jews in general, and against Israeli Jews, specifically.

Please do not start your next note with "Some of my best friends are ....".

Jonathan

I caught the tail end of an interview on NPR last night.  I believe Kuttab
was the interviewee.  The interviewer asked him to compare his experiences
in Israeli custody and Palestinian custody.  He demurred, but he said he'd
been in Palestinian custody longer than he'd been in Israeli custody.

My comments are not directed at any individuals, but at the behaviour of
the government of Israel.  I also disapprove of many of the actions of
the Palestinian Authority.  And I have not hesitated to criticize my own
government when it behaves ashamedly.

But if your government's behaviour does not change, you cannot expect to
ever be at peace with your neighbors.

Comments like "poisonous venom" are not at all helpful.

You must recognize that your government has been cited by the nations of
the world for its use of torture, and has PUBLICLY REFUSED to obey
international regulations concerning the same.

The cartoon in question, by Wasserman, appeared on the main editorial page
of the main Boston newspaper.  However, suggestions that this is where I
"get my news" are nonsense.  I've read the articles in the world press
about the use of torture by the Israeli government.  Have you?

/john

    \\But if your government's behaviour does not change, you cannot expect
    \\to ever be at peace with your neighbors.
        
    It will be difficult to have real peace, but do you really think that
    the obstacle to real peace is the Israeli governement ?
        
    The previous notes show that the Palestinian Autorithy does not agree
    to have Jews owning land in the region. This is in line with their will
    to deny to Israel any right to own land and to exist in the Middle East...
    as per the Islam which does not accept any non-Muslem Nation to be
    independant in this region. 
        
    So long the Palestinian Authority behaviour will not change, there
    is no hope to have peace and if you are honest in your will to help
    the peace process you better attack the right target.
    
    You mentionned the UN. Yes, the Nations of the world were used to
    see Jews being persecuted and now that Jews defend themselves, it is
    maybe difficult to accept...??
    

    Personally, I'm embarrassed by similar actions of people who call
    themselves Christians.  They should know better.