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Bahrain-based Saudi-financed “Islamic” bank Arcapita doing rich business with Israel military

Posted by Ali Abunimah

This blog reported on 9 October that American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP) Board Member Marwan M. Atalla and his investment firm NEST U.S.A. Inc. are shareholders in Cirrus Design Corporation, an aircraft manufacturing firm which does millions in business with Israeli military contractors closely tied to the Israeli military establishment. (See “Board member of Ziad Asali’s ATFP does millions in business with Israeli military firm” )<!–more–>

As the earlier post explains, Cirrus has a long history of working with Israeli companies and recently chose an Israeli military contractor called TAT Technologies to supply $10 million worth of aircraft parts. TAT Technologies is run by Israeli military officers, including a former commander of Israeli occupation forces in southern Lebanon, and its factory is built on the land of the ethnically-cleansed Palestinian village of Yasur.

Since publishing that post, I have received new information from a former employee who is also a current minority shareholder at Cirrus. According to this individual Atalla was an active board member of Cirrus until 2001, but was forced to resign along with other independent board members when another investor, the First Islamic Investment Bank of Bahrain took a majority stake in Cirrus. Atalla and his firm NEST U.S.A. Inc. remain shareholders of Cirrus as of this time, according to NEST’s own website.

In 2005, the First Islamic Investment Bank of Bahrain changed its name to Arcapita. Arcapita is financed by investors in Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia and is well-connected to those countries’ ruling families.

The Arcapita website states on its current corporate investments page that it acquired a stake in “Cirrus Design Corporation” in 2001, but does not say how big the stake is. A 2007 report on aviation industry website AVweb, put Arcapita’s stake at a controlling 58 percent.

While the AVweb report mentions that Arcapita was seeking to divest from Cirrus, in fact it has become more deeply involved. An April 2009 press release from Cirrus stated that Arcapita had pumped even more money into the company during the global financial crisis.

As an Islamic investment bank, all of Arcapita’s investments are screened by its Shariah Supervisory Board which currently includes a religious scholar and former judge from the Supreme Court in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, as well as religious scholars from Pakistan and Bahrain. Such advisory boards are supposed to screen investments to make sure they comply with Islamic banking standards — typically avoiding interest, or investments in alcohol or pornography.

But for Arcapita, at least, there seems to be nothing un-Islamic about profiting from deals with the Israeli military establishment — the same military that has slaughtered more than nine thousand Muslims, Christians and others and injured and permanently maimed tens of thousands more in Palestine and Lebanon in the past decade alone in what numerous international investigations have termed war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Needless to say, Arcapita-controlled Cirrus’ business with the Israeli military establishment is a gross violation of the Palestinian civil society call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) on Israel.

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Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi Declares An Alternative To Failing Negotiations

Editor Palestine Monitor

 

Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi

Palestine Monito, October 12, 2010

Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, Secretary General of the Palestinian National Initiative (PNI), MP and runner-up in the 2005 presidential election declared in a press conference in Ramallah yesterday that failed negotiations are threatening the last opportunity of peace based on a two-state solution. He argued that negotiations are meaningless and damaging while Israeli settlement building continues, and proposed an initiative to surpass the intractable impasse in the so called peace process.

The initiative includes:

Declaration of a Palestinian independent, democratic state on all territories occupied in 1967 including its capital of East Jerusalem, according to the borders of June 4 1967.

Demanding that all states, governments and international institutions recognise the Palestinian state and its borders immediately.

Lobbying the UN General Assembly to issue a recognition of the Palestinian state and a demand that Israel end the occupation of its land, borders, airspace, and water resources, removing all illegal settlements from Palestinian territories.

Demanding punitive action against Israel should it continue its occupation of the Palestinian state.

Dr. Barghouthi added that this initiative is an effort to seize the last opportunity of peace based on a two-state solution, and to achieve real and lasting peace in the wider region. The proposition could be the last chance to save the idea of an independent Palestinian state.

Were the world to recognise a Palestinian state with its borders, it would finally provide an equal footing for negotiations, Barghouthi argued, “rather than conditions of the present negotiations that are happening between totally inequitable parties. Where Israel is effectively allowed a dominant veto power on all issues, including the agenda and terms of reference, as well as total impunity to violate international law and so many UN Resolutions.”

In fact, he said, “The continuation of Israeli settlement activities, even during the false ‘partial’ freeze, is nothing but a well-designed process to kill the possibility of an independent Palestinian state. (Israel is) using negotiations as a cover for the de facto, unilateral imposition of an apartheid system that transforms the concept of a Palestinian state into nothing but clusters of ghettos and small Bantustans.”

Dr. Barghouthi also affirmed that the settlements constitute the front line of a matrix that includes checkpoints, the Apartheid Wall, security zones, classified territories (Area C), segregated roads and even the so-called nature reserves that already consume more than 60% of the West Bank and 80% of water resources. He likened settlements to a cancer that continues to grow, actually enhancing its growth during the endless ‘peace processes’, and that the cancer will ultimately kill the two state solution.

Dr. Barghouthi cited the ‘Jewish Loyalty Oath’ amendment to the Citizenship Act, and Netanyahu’s demand that Israel be recognised as a Jewish state in exchange for a partial, temporary and meaningless freeze of settlements as an official declaration of an apartheid system and abandonment of democracy in Israel.

He also said that the PNI initiative is a test to the claims made by many countries that they support the establishment of an independent Palestinian state and the building of its institutions. He cited Kosovo’s declaration of independence and its recognition by the international community as a model to be replicated.

Dr. Barghouthi warned that, “If the international community rejects this option it will be the death of the two-state solution and Palestinians will be left to struggle against apartheid in one state.” He vowed that his movement, the PNI, will initiate an international campaign with other Palestinian parties to convince the governments and people of the world to recognise and support a sovereign Palestinian democratic state on 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Learn more about the Palestinian National Initiative here http://www.almubadara.org/new/engli…
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Laid on a little too thick

Gaza, hasbara version

The two  videos below are being targeted by a clever hasbara outfit  which proposes you to download its program so you are informed of any unfavorable piece of news about Israel and you are urged to strike back.  Do they really believe that they can continue to  fool us ?

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Tunisians unhappy about Abbas

Tunisian attacked the Ambassador of “the authority” in Tunisia Salman El Horfi after he gave, in a conference, false information on the blockade of Gaza and after he carried charges against the Moslem Brothers and Hamas. And the present have paid homage to the besieged population of Gaza, and greeted the force of its people besieged for more than 4 years and resistance Palestinian and expressed their support and the support of all the Arab people with the population of Palestine. Tunisian indicated that Abbas is illegitimate and does not represent in any case the Palestinians, and criticized at the same time, the negotiations and the coordination of safety with the occupant. The remarks of the Ambassador raised the anger of crowd and pushed to leave the room to withdraw itself to protest against its remarks. It also denounced the advisory opinion (Fatwa) of the judge in chief of Palestine Tayseer Tamimi, which authorized to visit Jerusalem and to pray in El Aqsa, in the shade of the occupant Zionist. Such a recommendation will be used by the Zionist entity to legitimate his occupation and to standardize its relations with the Arab States lake Moubarak and Abdallah try to do.
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Palestinian Israelis are to have ‘Jewish’ nationality (as Jews once had to be public Christians in Europe)

by Shmuel Sermoneta-Gertel on October 10, 2010

Today the Israeli government approved a proposal by Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman to change the declaration of loyalty required of all non-Jews applying for Israeli citizenship (excluding those entitled to citizenship according to the Law of Return).  Neeman’s proposal seeks to amend the current declaration – “I declare that I will be a loyal national of the State of Israel” (Nationality Law 5712-1952, art. 5c) – to include the words “as a Jewish and democratic state”.

The timing is symbolic. Exactly ten years ago, the first ten days of October 2000 were marked by protests in northern Israel, brutally repressed by Israeli police, who used live ammunition, rubber-coated steel bullets and tear gas against Palestinian Israeli citizens, leaving 13 dead. Israeli security forces have never used live ammunition against Jewish protesters – no matter how violent. The contradiction between “Jewish” and “democratic” could not have been more poignant. The events were a watershed for Palestinian Israelis, comparable to 30 March 1976 (“Land Day”), demonstrating once again their second-class citizenship and exclusion (“treated as enemies”), and affirming their connection to Palestinians on the other side of the “green line”.

And for many Jewish Israelis, the protests themselves (in solidarity with Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in the OPT) reflected the basic disloyalty of Palestinian citizens to the Jewish state.

A commission of inquiry (the Or Commission) identified institutional discrimination as one of the root causes of Palestinian discontent, and made a series of recommendations to address this inequality. Not only have the commission’s recommendations been ignored, but since October 2000, efforts have been redoubled to “Judaise” the Galilee, Wadi ‘Ara and the Triangle, and to discredit Palestinian Israeli leaders and representatives in the Knesset. The ban on Palestinian family unification (where one spouse is an Israeli citizen and the other a Palestinian from the OPT) can also be traced to these events, as can recent attempts to reinforce Israel’s “Jewish character” – in proposed legislation such as the amendment to the declaration of loyalty (for other examples, see the Association for Civil Rights in Israel’s position paper Harming Democracy in the Heart of Democracy), and in the repeated demand for international and especially Palestinian recognition of Israel “as a Jewish state”.

Another Israeli policy with roots in the October Events is the crackdown on Palestinian civil society, as described by Ameer Makhoul.

In The Time of the Green Line, Yehouda Shenhav compares the situation of Palestinian citizens of Israel to that of emancipated Jews in 19th-century Europe (beginning with Prussia, in 1841), who were afforded individual freedoms, but required to be “Christians” in public. Shenhav writes:

According to the model of the green line, Palestinian nationalism must accept the Judaism of the public sphere; it does not allow recognition of Palestinian nationalism that is not subservient, and denies Palestinian citizens of Israel collective political rights. The demand that the state be Jewish and democratic requires Palestinian citizens of Israel to define their nationality as Jewish, even if they are Muslims or Christians by religion. … Palestinian citizens of Israel are not willing to define their nationality as Jewish … all the more so, because the Jewish state defines their own nationality as that of an enemy.

During the Oslo years, many Israeli Jews, even on the left, believed that this transformation had largely been accomplished, that Israel’s Palestinian citizens had developed a national identity distinct from that of other Palestinians, a “Jewish” identity. The events of October 2000 shattered those illusions, but led very few to question the political and ideological system behind them, opting instead for more of the same: forced Judaisation, not only of the land, but of all of its inhabitants – with the caveat that they will never be treated as equals.

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Witness – Two Schools in Nablus –

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Double entendre

Paul J. Balles 

October 9, 2010

Westerners, especially Americans, often look at violence in the Middle East as a result of the teachings of Islam.

This week’s talk show by Christiane Amanpour’s spent the better part of two hours discussing Islam and how people are reacting to Islam as a source of fanaticism publicised in the press.

The Western public has been seduced into believing that reactions of “extremists” have something to do with Islam. Extremist reprisals have nothing to do with religion. They are expressions of revenge. Anti-American reactions have been what Reverend Jeremiah Wright called “bringing the chickens home to roost.”

How can the West expect a placid reaction to their own actions when they have massacred more than 1,300,000 Iraqis, let alone the Afghans and the support given to Israel for their vicious savagery in Lebanon and Gaza?

How can we expect anything but calls for retribution when the agonizing stories of innocent victims of military atrocities get told and retold?

Just this week, the New York Times published the unusual report of a grotesque story from a small village in Kandahar Province in Afghanistan.

A woman told how American military men took her husband, a local mullah in Maiwand, out of their house, forced him to the ground, put a grenade under his body and blew him up.

The mullah was the third victim of soldiers who killed Afghan civilians for no apparent reason. Is this the kind of activity that’s supposed to endear people around the world to America?

According to the New York Times, “Local elders estimate that in the past eight months at least 42 civilians have been killed in Maiwand during American operations.”

Expand that relatively small area to the much larger scope of American military action in the Middle East and the incentives for revenge multiply.

One Afghan elder reportedly said, “The Americans have killed many people who did not support the Taliban, which is painful for us and actually creates hatred toward Americans.”

In another incident reported by the New York Times this week, five soldiers are facing potential courts-martial on charges that they killed Afghan civilians for sport.

The report says they were “planting weapons near them (Afghans) to fake combat situations, collecting their body parts and taking photographs posing with their corpses.”

Also this week, a chicken that came home to roost was tried in New York. Pakistani born Faisal Shahzad, who planted a car bomb in Times Square, New York on May 1st, was sentenced to life in prison.

MSNBC reported that Shahzad came to court to tell Americans he felt no remorse about his May 1 bombing attempt. “Brace yourselves, because the war with Muslims has just begun,” said Shahzad.

It’s a great anomaly that Americans expect the extremists to feel remorse for their acts of revenge when most Americans express no remorse over our mindless murder and maiming of innocents abroad.

Moderate and peace loving, as all but the very few extremists like Shahzad are, Muslims are innocent victims of hate and hate crimes.

Writing in the Princetonian, Adam Bradlow observed “Intolerance toward Muslims has become part of the new norm.”

Anti mosque rallies have broken out in at least four states, including the recent protests against the “ground zero” Community Centre in New York.

Speaking out against the Centre, past speaker of the US Congress Newt Gingrich called it “an Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization.”

Elizabeth Madrid, editor of the Tennessee Journal, reminds her readers, and hopefully Gingrich, that “A handful of extremists cannot rightly represent the entire Muslim faith.”

* Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. For more information, see http://www.pballes.com

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Science Fair Bethlehem University

These are images from the annual science fair held at Bethlehem University (BU). BU students create and run teh exihibits and hundreds of high-school and middle school students attend the fair.

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New Side-by-Side Gaza Flotilla Timeline Report Discredits Israeli Version of Events

 

Navi Marmara

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

WASHINGTON D.C., October 7, 2010: A comprehensive report examining the minute-by-minute versions of the same events during the Gaza-bound Freedom Flotilla attack by Israel was released by two charity groups today. Contrasting passenger testimonies against official Israeli accounts side-by-side to each other, a complete picture can be seen as to exactly what transpired in the days and hours leading up to the incident as well as its aftermath.

The attack took place in international waters in the early hours of May 31, 2010 as humanitarian aid workers carrying goods and supplies, including medical equipment, attempted to break the Israeli-imposed blockade on Gaza. The attack on the six ships in the flotilla led to the deaths of nine passengers on the Turkish-supported Mavi Marmara ship. The result has been an intense worldwide condemnation of Israeli policies towards the increase in aid missions.

The Timeline and Inconsistencies Report, co-sponsored by the International Bureau of Humanitarian NGOs (IBH) in Geneva and Paris, and the Friends of Charities Association (FOCA) in Washington D.C., takes each individual action as it happened, and aligns the passenger version against the Israeli account. The “conclusions are in sharp contrast to the Israeli official version of events,” the report found.

Released as an advance copy coincidentally on the same day as the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) issued its damning conclusions of Israeli actions, the timeline analysis lets the evidence speak for itself.

Tom Nelson, lawyer and spokesperson for FOCA, presented the Timeline Report to colleagues in Europe this week. “It got absolutely raving positive reviews here in Brussels,” he said, adding, “It is a powerful supplement to the UN Human Rights Commission report.”

IBH and FOCA conducted the research over a 4-month period based on information gathered from passenger testimonies, government authorities, world press coverage, official videos and film smuggled from the ship, as well as the United Nations report, Israeli self-inquiry, and Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH) report.

Conclusions  show  that  Israel  clearly  manipulated  evidence  to  bolster  its  argument  that  the  attack  on  the Mavi  Marmara  was  in  self-defense  against  armed  violent  activists.   Using  second-by-second  analysis,  the reports shows how the six passengers killed were victims of execution-style murders by the Israeli soldiers.

Examples  of  manufactured  computer-generated  images  installed  into  the  official  Israeli  video  released  are revealed as individual frames.

The report goes on to note that when passengers were detained and independently and consistently testified to  being  beaten,  sexually  harassed  and  abused,  “no  argument  as  to  imminent  threat  could  be  justified”  by the Israeli authorities.

The report can be viewed and downloaded at http://www.foca.net/media/documents/timeline-inconsistencies-gaza-flotilla-attack-31052010.pdf

###

ABOUT THE REPORT SPONSORS

International Bureau of Humanitarian NGOs (IBH) and Friends of Charities Association (FOCA)

IBH and FOCA are non-profit organizations that advocate the rights of Islamic charities throughout the world, promote ties with civil society groups, and support the reform of global security laws and policies that impact charities of all denominations.

MEDIA CONTACTS

Wendell Belew: Tel +1202 255 3808; Email wbelew@belewlaw.com

Tom Nelson: Tel +1 503 622 3262; Email nelson@thnelson.com

_________________________________

Friends of Charities Association (FOCA) 1150 Connecticut Avenue NW

Suite 900

Washington, DC 20036

Tel: + 1 202 862 4348

Fax: +1 202 364 8868 Email: info@foca.net

www.foca.net

International Bureau of Humanitarian NGOs (IBH)

Geneva and Paris

Tel & Fax: +33 1 4746 1988

Email: ibh@ibh.me

www.ibh.me; www.humanitarianibh.net

Source: FOCA, IBH

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