I Come From There

I come from there and I have memories
Born as mortals are, I have a mother
And a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends,
And a prison cell with a cold window.
Mine is the wave, snatched by sea-gulls,
I have my own view,
And an extra blade of grass.
Mine is the moon at the far edge of the words,
And the bounty of birds,
And the immortal olive tree.
I walked this land before the swords
Turned its living body into a laden table.

I come from there. I render the sky unto her mother
When the sky weeps for her mother.
And I weep to make myself known

To a returning cloud.
I learnt all the words worthy of the court of blood
So that I could break the rule.
I learnt all the words and broke them up
To make a single word: Homeland...
Mahmoud Darwish:

A State of Siege - Fragments

Here, on the slopes of hills,
watching sunsets,
facing the cannons of time,
here by orchards with severed shadows,
we do what prisoners
what the unemployed do:
we nurse hope.

This siege will last until we teach our enemy
selections of pre-Islamic poetry.

Pain is:
when the housewife doesn't set up the clothesline
in the morning and preoccupies herself with the cleanness of the flag.

The soldiers gauge the distance between being and nothingness
with a tank's telescope.

We gauge the distance between our bodies and shells
with the sixth sense.

You who stand on our doorstep, come in
and drink with us Arabic coffee
[you might feel you are humans like us].
You who stand on our doorstep
get out of our mornings
so we can be certain
we are humans like you.

Behind the soldiers,
the pine trees and minarets
keep the sky from arching downward.
Behind the iron fence soldiers pee--
guarded by tanks--
and this autumn day keeps up its golden stroll
in a street wide as a church after Sunday prayer.

A humorous writer once said to me:
"If I knew the end, from the beginning,
I would have no business with words."

The siege will last until those who lay the siege feel,
like the besieged, that boredom is a human attribute.

To resist means to maintain the soundness
of the heart and testicles and your interminable disease:
hope.
Mahmoud Darwish:

The Farhud: Roots of The Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust



The Nazis needed oil. The Arabs wanted the Jews and British out of Iraq. The Mufti of Jerusalem forged a far-ranging alliance with Hitler resulting in the June 1941 Farhud, a Nazi-style pogrom in Baghdad that set the stage for the devastation and expulsion of the Iraqi Jews and ultimately almost a million Jews across the Arab world. The Farhud was the beginning of what became a broad Nazi-Arab alliance in the Holocaust.

https://www.amazon.com/Farhud-Roots-Arab-Nazi-Alliance-Holocaust/dp/0914153145/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=the+farhud&qid=1591529747&s=books&sr=1-1

Writing is a puppy biting the void;
it wounds without blood.

Our coffee cups, the birds
and green trees with blue shade,
and sun leaping from wall
toward another wall, like a gazelle,
and water in clouds of endless forms
spread across whatever ration of sky is left for us,
and things whose remembrance is deferred
and this morning, strong and luminous—
all beckon we are guests of eternity.

For as long as the Palestinians have endured occupation and oppression—first under the British in the 1920-30s, then by the Israeli state after 1948—they have produced writers and poets who have articulated not only humiliation and despair, but also resistance and the hope of liberation.

The Munich Olympics opened on August 26, 1972, with 195 events and 7,173 athletes representing 121 countries. On the morning of September 5, Palestinian terrorists in ski masks ambushed the Israeli team. After negotiations to free the nine Israelis broke down, the terrorists took the hostages to the Munich airport. Once there, German police opened fire from rooftops and killed three of the terrorists. A gun battle erupted and left the hostages, two more Palestinians and a policeman dead.

After a memorial service was held for the athletes at the main Olympic stadium, International Olympic Committee President Avery Brundage ordered that the games continue, to show that the terrorists hadn’t won. Although the tragedy deeply marred the games, there were numerous moments of spectacular athletic achievement, including American swimmer Mark Spitz’s seven gold medals and teenage Russian gymnast Olga Korbut’s two dramatic gold-medal victories.

In the aftermath of the murders at the ’72 Olympics, the Israeli government, headed by Golda Meir, hired a group of Mossad agents to track down and kill the Black September assassins. The 2005 Stephen Spielberg movie Munich was based on these events.

Resist, My People, Resist Them (Dareen Tatour)


Resist, my people, resist them.

In Jerusalem, I dressed my wounds and breathed my sorrows

And carried the soul in my palm

For an Arab Palestine.

I will not succumb to the “peaceful solution,”

Never lower my flags

Until I evict them from my land.

I cast them aside for a coming time.

Resist, my people, resist them.

Resist the settler’s robbery

And follow the caravan of martyrs.

Shred the disgraceful constitution

Which imposed degradation and humiliation

And deterred us from restoring justice.

They burned blameless children;

As for Hadil, they sniped her in public,

Killed her in broad daylight.

Resist, my people, resist them.

Resist the colonialist’s onslaught.

Pay no mind to his agents among us

Who chain us with the peaceful illusion.

Do not fear doubtful tongues;

The truth in your heart is stronger,

As long as you resist in a land

That has lived through raids and victory.

So Ali called from his grave:

Resist, my rebellious people.

Write me as prose on the agarwood;

My remains have you as a response.

Resist, my people, resist them.

Resist, my people, resist them.

Poetry and propaganda never won anything...

According to the New York Times, Israel is to blame for the latest round of hostilities between Gaza and Israel, having targeted Palestinian Islamic Jihad commander Baha Abu al-Ata for assassination. Palestinian terrorism and its role in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, by contrast, is sanitized or erased.

In his contorted analysis of the current situation (“As Islamic Jihad and Israel Battled, Hamas, in a Twist, Sat on the Sidelines”), New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief David Halbfinger downplays Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) as a pesky gadfly to Gaza’s Hamas rulers — in his sanitizing words, “a nettlesome, unruly and heavily armed little group” that is hampering Hamas’ efforts “to keep a lid on its conflict with Israel”.

According to Halbfinger, the problem with the PIJ’s “firing hundreds of rockets into Israel” is not the targeting of millions of innocent civilians, forcing them into bomb shelters, but the “sabotaging” of Hamas’ plans to “improve the abysmal quality of life of the Palestinians” under its rule by provoking Israel to “rain down destruction on Hamas’s own installations and men.” Israel, in the New York Times, is ever the culprit.

What the New York Times assiduously ignores is that:

PIJ is one of the most violent Islamist terrorist organizations in the world whose “Manifesto of the Islamic Jihad in Palestine” declares its goal is to “destroy Israel and to end all Western influence in the region.”

PIJ’s enemies include the United States, labelled “the Great-Satan America.”

The terror group rejects “any peaceful solution to the Palestinian cause” insisting that “Jihad” and “martyrdom”—i.e. terrorism – is the only way of achieving its goal of replacing the Westernized Jewish state with an Islamic one.

While Halbfinger cites “Israeli analysts” who accuse Islamic Jihad of being an Iranian proxy, he avoids pointing out that since September 2000, Iran has paid PIJ millions of dollars in bonuses for each successful attack carried out by PIJ; that it has provided PIJ with sophisticated weaponry that includes the Fajr-5 long-range rockets used by PIJ to target civilians deep inside Israel; that it has been helping PIJ produce precision missiles known as “Ashkelon’s hell” that can reach Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Netanya and “even further.” Rather, Halbfinger mitigates these Iran-sponsored war crimes in vague, soft language about Iran’s use of the PIJ “to send Israel messages through relatively low-risk acts of violence.”

Nowhere does the article indicate that PIJ’s armed Al Quds Brigades has taken responsibility for dozens of large-scale bombings of civilian targets– on buses, restaurants, shopping malls, markets, that it has established terrorist training camps for youth, that it boasts having mortars, RPGs, machine guns, .50-caliber sniper rifles, and explosives in its arsenal, that it is involved in digging cross-border tunnels to kidnap Israelis, smuggle weapons and carry out large-scale terror attacks inside Israel.

Nor does the analysis make any reference to PIJ’s overtly anti-Semitic statements, Holocaust denial and threats of slaughter.

The only mention of “terrorist” comes in Halbfinger’s statement that both PIJ and Hamas are “viewed as terrorist organizations by Israel and the United States” as if those two countries are alone in sharing a partisan perspective about PIJ. What the journalist conceals is that numerous other countries, including Canada, the UK, the EU, Australia, New Zealand, Japan similarly count PIJ as a foreign terror group.

The New York Times correspondent does not bother to explain that the U.S. State Department has designated PIJ a foreign terrorist organization since October 1997, because of the group’s commitment “to the destruction of Israel through attacks against Israeli military and civilian targets and to the creation of an Islamic state in historic Palestine, including present day Israel.” Nor does he note that raining missiles down on Israeli civilians is itself a war crime.

Instead, he loftily describes the terrorist organization as representing the “untrammeled id of the Palestinian resistance movement” — a movement that is elsewhere in the article described as “resistance to the Israeli occupation.” The article thus misleads readers into thinking that the terrorist group’s goal is to resist an Israeli presence in disputed territories, when in fact PIJ declares its mission is to wipe the entire Jewish state off the map and is unwilling to accept Israel within any borders whatsoever.

In this way, the New York Times transforms Palestinian terrorism, war crimes, and attempts to annihilate the Jewish state into mere “resistance” against Israeli actions. It is another example of how the newspaper covers up Palestinian responsibility for the conflict, blaming Israel instead.

Contrary to how the same newspaper covered the assassination of ISIS leader Abu Baker al-Baghdadi just two weeks earlier, repeatedly referring to him and his organization as “terrorist,” the New York Times scrupulously refuses to label Palestinian terrorists as such. And if journalists slip and include a reference to Palestinian terrorist organizations, as CAMERA just documented, the newspapers’ editors make sure to scrub it from the record.

This is not accurate or ethical journalism. It is advocacy journalism that misleads the public about what is going on – and provides just another illustration of the New York Times’ ingrained bias against the Jewish state.

Feel free to wave your meaningless flag or quote some poetry now...I'll be sure to bring more facts of terrorism.

Think you two are going to meet up for "A square go!" ( A fight) someday, eh? 🥊🥊🥊🥊

Gee Whiz, everybody is biased against Israel,An Illegal State, except for all these great "Facts" you post.. Go figure eh?

Palestinian women jailed for anti-occupation poems

https://www.thenational.ae/world/mena/palestinian-women-jailed-for-anti-occupation-poems-1.755776

Poetry is not a crime, unless you are a Palestinian I suppose.

Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, the entity that rules the West Bank (otherwise known as Judea and Samaria) has been appointed to lead a terrorist organization. Although the press has frequently called Abbas, who also leads the Fatah movement and the Palestine Liberation Organization, a “moderate” and the P.A. a “peace partner,” not a single major U.S. news outlet has reported the P.A. chief’s new job.

According to Palestinian Media Watch, a nonprofit organization that monitors Arab media in the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, on Aug. 2, the official newspaper of the P.A. reported that Abbas was now “the one responsible for the Palestinian National Fund.”

Israel’s defense ministry designated the PNF a terrorist organization in March 2017, noting: “The fund has a crucial role in the financial support for Palestinian terrorist operatives imprisoned in Israel, and it is used as the most significant route for transferring money.”

Times of Israel reporters Judah Ari Gross and Eric Cortellessa have reported that although the PNF “is said to contain billions of dollars from wealthy Arab donors and profits from various investments … there is little transparency or oversight in the management and use of funds.”

Abbas’ appointment should be newsworthy. As PMW pointed out, the P.A. president is now in violation of Israel’s Counter Terrorism Law 2016-5776, which stipulates that “one who heads a terrorist organization or manages it or takes part in directing the terror organization in general, directly or indirectly” faces “25 years imprisonment.” In other words, a nominal U.S. ally is now leading a terrorist organization.

Indeed, the P.A. is the recipient of considerable Western aid and support and has long been central to the U.S. policy of promoting a two-state solution. The United States even helped create the P.A. as part of the Oslo process in which Palestinian leadership renounced “the use of terrorism and other acts of violence,” promising a “new epoch of peaceful coexistence, free from violence and all other acts which endanger peace and stability.” Needless to say, this hardly squares with paying terrorists.

Yet, many in the press have described Abbas as “moderate” — despite his public refusals to end the terror slush fund.

Several recent reports by The Washington Post, The New York Times and Foreign Policy magazine, among others, have highlighted recent U.S. aid cuts to Palestinian-related entities. In 2017, for example, The Washington Post alone ran more than a dozen stories relating to the peace process. This makes the failure of major U.S. news outlets to report on Abbas’ new posting all the more striking.

The fund itself — and the Authority’s policy of financially incentivizing terrorism — has been the subject of some media attention, much of it inaccurate, as the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America documented in a March 21 Washington Examiner op-ed. In one particularly egregious example, The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” column even approvingly cited research about Palestinian prisoners that was provided by the Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCI-P), a group tied to the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a U.S.-designated terror organization.
But facts are stubborn things.

According to a Jan. 9 report by Israel’s defense ministry, the P.A. paid terrorists and their families nearly $350 million in 2017 — $160 million for jailed and released prisoners, and $190 million for their families. Payments increase with the length of the sentence and the number of people killed or injured in a terror attack.

Abbas could put an end to these payments. But the prospective peace partner has planted his feet firmly in the sand.

In underreported July 23 remarks in Ramallah, Abbas called imprisoned terrorists “pioneers” while conferring medals on their families. According to a translation provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute, Abbas then exhorted: “We will neither reduce nor prevent [payment] of allowances to the families of martyrs, prisoners, and released prisoners, as some seek, and if we had only a single penny left, we would pay it to families of the martyrs and prisoners.” Not a single major Western newspaper noted Abbas’ remarks — although some, such as The Washington Post, have previously run stories on Chinese tourists purportedly being overcharged at an Israeli restaurant, among other frivolities.

Equally stubborn, then, are both the Palestinian leadership, which remains committed to paying terrorists, and the many major U.S. news outlets that are seemingly committed to ignoring or obfuscating facts inconvenient to their “blame Israel” narrative.

Thanks for the input, as usual all wrong doings of the Israelis have been whitewashed by your fine self...

I'll have to leave for now, but thanks again for keeping this thread alive..

Keep away from trouble and sing to it. ...Palestinian proverb





As-salamu alaykum

Al-Farhud



During the first two days of June, 1941 - which was the days of Shavuot, one of the major Jewish holidays, - Iraqi nationalists and Palestinian Arabs, headed by Hajj Amin al-Husayni, Jerusalem Mufti have staged bloody pogrom of unarmed, civilian Jewish community in Iraq. The massacre resulted in 145 victims, thousands of injured, and hundreds of children and women raped. It played a major role in speeding up the destruction of the oldest Jewish community outside of Eretz Israel. The Al-Farhud consists of papers on the pogrom and events leading up to it (some originally published in English and others written in Hebrew and appearing now in English for the first time); the book make public previously unknown documents which vividly document Palestinian Arabs as Nazi collaborators long before they metamorphosed into permanent "refugees."

https://www.amazon.com/Al-Farhud-Schmuel-More/dp/9654934906/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=al-farhud&qid=1591534733&s=books&sr=1-1

As you prepare your breakfast, think of others
(do not forget the pigeon’s food).

– Mahmoud Darwish



A family favourite in most Palestinian homes...

Green Beans in Tomato Sauce.

Ingredients (Serves 4)

250g of frozen green beans (or fresh ones if available)
One medium onion
3 cloves of garlic
5 tablespoons of olive oil
A tin of chopped tomatoes (or 100g of tomato puree with a handful of fresh crushed tomatoes)
Salt and pepper
750ml of hot water
Method (but no madness!)
Put olive oil in a heavy-based pot and add chopped onion and stir for 5 minutes on medium heat until golden. Add crushed garlic and stir for one minute. Add beans and stir for a further three minutes. Add the pureed tomatoes and stir for 2 minutes. Then add a handful of crushed tomatoes or a whole tin of high quality Italian tomatoes (and not the pureed). Stir and add a bit of salt and pepper to taste. Add 750 ml f hot water.

Cook for 15 – 20 minutes until beans are tender and tomatoes are cooked. Add a dash of hot water if a little dry.

Serve with rice. Sahtain!

Another favorite in Palestinian homes...

Palestinians Training Kids to be Suicide Bombers

The extent of this corruption of children's minds was vividly exposed last week by the investigative journalist Gerald Posner, who produced a Web documentary (hosted by thedailybeast.com) based on videos culled from television by Palestinian Media Watch. It is deeply shocking to observe children being programmed for terrorism through the exaltation of suicide bombers as heroes. "Martyrdom is bliss," a child hostess says, referring to a 14-year-old suicide killer. The clips show incessant indoctrination that Islam wants the death of adults and children for Allah and will reward those who achieve Shahada, which Palestinian Media Watch equates with death for Allah. "I have let my land drink my blood, and I have loved the way of Shahada," intones a young boy.

Children being taught murder by rote is child abuse, a mental deformation more damaging than physical injury. Equally disgusting is the demonization of Jews based on a phony history of the Holocaust. Remember the Holocaust, in which the Nazis killed 6 million Jews? Well, take a look at the scene from a PA Fatah "educational video" in which children acting and singing about history recite: "They [Israel] are the ones who did the Holocaust, their knife cuts to the length and width of our flesh. They opened the ovens for us to bake human beings. ... When an oven stops burning, they light 100 [more]." A body called the National Committee for Defense of Children from the Holocaust organized an exhibit, one feature of which, according to al-Ayyam, one of the largest Palestinian newspapers, is "an oven and inside it small [Palestinian] children are being burned. The picture speaks for itself."

This endlessly fraudulent education has had devastating effects on the prospects for peace. The world may have been appalled this year when students studying in a Jerusalem library were shot to death by a Palestinian terrorist, but the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research reports that 84 percent of Palestinians approved.

Wars routinely produce competitive ecstasies of hate. Is Israel any better? The answer is yes. In the early days of the state, the historical narrative of a nation under siege did prejudice the teaching. There were omissions, bias, and distorted stereotypes of Arabs--but not outright incitements to murder. And all that was cleaned up in three successive periods of revision, according to a major study by Prof. Elie Podeh that tracked the evolution of enlightened education in an Israel impelled by democratic values. Israeli schoolbooks no longer seek to impose a single narrative. Podeh concludes: "In historical and national terms, the Palestinians are currently in the same position that Israel was in 50 years ago. If Palestinian textbooks must go through the long, exhausting process undergone by Israeli textbooks, the prospects of a genuine and lasting Israeli-Palestinian conciliation may lie far in the future."

^^^More lists of whitewashed information, and Zionist propaganda..

Israeli snipers targeted children, health workers and journalists in Gaza protests, UN says..

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/02/28/israeli-snipers-targeted-children-health-workers-journalists/

May your day be as enjoyable as you..

Incoming Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is well aware of the PA's insidious lies. Last year, she called for them to stop: "These children deserve an education that instills a respect for life and peace instead of glorifying death and violence. It is disturbing to me as a mother, it is disturbing to me as a United States senator, because it basically, profoundly poisons the minds of these children." Now, she is in a position to do more. She can tell Abbas that the U.S. government will no longer give millions of dollars to a Palestinian Authority that actively pollutes the minds of the innocents. And the Europeans should follow suit.

And yet another favourite from my friend Ali from Rammalah, may he be safe and well...Insha Allah

Hummus

INGREDIENTS

150 gr of dry chickpeas
1 teaspoon of baking soda
1 small to medium garlic clove
3 to 4 tablespoons of tahini
3 to 4 tablespoons of lemon juice (1 lemon)
5 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon of salt
OPTIONAL: paprika or za'atar
STEPS

The soaking and cooking of the chickpeas require very little effort and attention so the real 'cooking' time is just 15 minutes. Making hummus with canned chickpeas will never be as nice and what it’s meant to taste like - making it from dried chickpeas is easy, you just need to think ahead.

Rinse the dry chickpeas, then soak them in plenty of water with 1 heaped teaspoon of baking soda for 10-12 hours.
Rinse out the chickpeas. Put them in a saucepan, cover with 1.25 litre of water, bring to boil and then simmer, partly covered, for about 60 minutes until soft. Do not put salt while the chickpeas cook. Occasionally skim off the foam that forms on the water's surface. Once the chickpeas are soft, drain BUT you need to keep the water the chickpeas cooked in.
Put the chickpeas in a blender. Pour 130 ml of the cooking water you saved then add the tahini, lemon juice, olive, garlic and salt. Mix it until you obtain a smooth texture, similar to thick yogurt. Add a bit more cooking water if you find the hummus too thick. Taste and then add more salt, tahini and lemon juice depending on your own taste.
Pour the hummus in a bowl and drizzle extra virgin olive oil over it. You can also add a sprinkle of paprika or some za’atar if you wish.
Serve it warm with arabic bread or eat it cold later. It keeps in the fridge for a couple of days.

Why does is not surprise that you would quote Hillary Clinton, while praising Trump..