Domestic violence against women in Gaza rises

But the war made them do it
March 27, 2009

More human rights violations from Hamas, this time against the usual target: Women. Ok, its men in Gaza not necessarily Hamas. However, there aren't many others left in Gaza besides Hamas after the civil war in 2007. Anyway, I digress:

The UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) in Gaza, local Palestinian NGOs and mental health professionals are reporting increased incidents of domestic violence and sexual assault against women in Gaza since the beginning of 2009.

An unpublished UNIFEM survey of male and female heads of 1,100 Gaza households conducted between 28 February and 3 March indicates there was an increase in violence against women during and after the 23-day war which ended on 18 January.

“According to our staff, and through clinical observation, there was increased violence against women and children during and after the war,” said public relations coordinator for the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP), Husam al-Nounou. “We can attribute this to the fact that most people were exposed to traumatic incidents during the war, and one way people react to stress is to become violent.”

So it was the war that caused men to beat or kill their wives? I guess we could find similar numbers in southern Israel where post traumatic stress from daily rockets attacks affects more than 50 percent of the population.

But don't blame the men. Although, if you read about how many women are treated in Islamic nations (and in America) you will find violence against women is rarely limited to war.

But al-Nounou insists.

“This war was extremely harsh, people felt insecure, vulnerable and unable to protect themselves, their children and their families; when people were trapped at home this increased the stress and anxiety,” said al-Nounou.

The center says child visits for divorced parents has doubled since the war (from 30 to 60). Bakr Turkmani, an attorney at the PCDCR, said "the number of divorce and separation cases has increased significantly since the war, and domestic violence played a role in the increase."

However, Turkmani must accompany the victims to the police station, otherwise their reports of abuse are not "accepted.” Why? Because compaints from women are not taken seriously. Therefore, most rapes and abuse are not reported in Islamic societies, according to organizations who work undercover with Muslim women.

But its the war:

Director of the women’s unit at the leading Palestinian human rights organisation, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), Muna As-Shawa, said the centre had received reports of increased domestic violence and sexual assault during and after the hostilities. The unit had counselled over 600 women.

“During and after the war women struggled to fulfil their roles as mothers, and care for their children without electricity and water, while under attack,” said As-Shawa, “and if the husband died, sometimes the father-in-law took the inheritance and tried to take custody of the children.”

Presumably because the father in law was stressed too.

The full article is here.

Arab reporter shocked by anti-Semitism on U.S. campuses

March 27, 2009

Khaled Abu Toameh, a journalist for The Jerusalem Post, thought he was talking to "a Hamas spokesman or a would-be-suicide bomber" when speaking to some students and professors at American universities.

In an article titles, On Campus: The Pro-Palestinians' Real Agenda, Toameh writes that he "discovered that there is more sympathy for Hamas there than there is in Ramallah."

I was told, for instance, that Israel has no right to exist, that Israel’s “apartheid system” is worse than the one that existed in South Africa and that Operation Cast Lead was launched only because Hamas was beginning to show signs that it was interested in making peace and not because of the rockets that the Islamic movement was launching at Israeli communities.

I was also told that top Fatah operative Marwan Barghouti, who is serving five life terms in prison for masterminding terror attacks against Israeli civilians, was thrown behind bars simply because he was trying to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Furthermore, I was told that all the talk about financial corruption in the Palestinian Authority was “Zionist propaganda” and that Yasser Arafat had done wonderful things for his people, including the establishment of schools, hospitals and universities.

...When the self-designated “pro-Palestinian” lobbyists are unable to challenge the facts presented by a speaker, they resort to verbal abuse.

On one campus, for example, I was condemned as an “idiot” because I said that a majority of Palestinians voted for Hamas in the January 2006 election because they were fed up with financial corruption in the Palestinian Authority.

On another campus, I was dubbed as a “mouthpiece for the Zionists” because I said that Israel has a free media. There was another campus where someone told me that I was a ‘liar” because I said that Barghouti was sentenced to five life terms because of his role in terrorism.

And then there was the campus (in Chicago) where I was “greeted” with swastikas that were painted over posters promoting my talk. The perpetrators, of course, never showed up at my event because they would not be able to challenge someone who has been working in the field for nearly 30 years.

What struck me more than anything else was the fact that many of the people I met on the campuses supported Hamas and believed that it had the right to “resist the occupation” even if that meant blowing up children and women on a bus in downtown Jerusalem.

I never imagined that I would need police protection while speaking at a university in the U.S. I have been on many Palestinian campuses in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and I cannot recall one case where I felt intimidated or where someone shouted abuse at me.

Ironically, many of the Arabs and Muslims I met on the campuses were much more understanding and even welcomed my “even-handed analysis” of the Israeli-Arab conflict. After all, the views I voiced were not much different than those made by the leaderships both in Israel and the Palestinian Authority. These views include support for the two-state solution and the idea of coexistence between Jews and Arabs in this part of the world.

Their hatred for Israel and what it stands for has blinded them to a point where they no longer care about the real interests of the Palestinians, namely the need to end the anarchy and lawlessness, and to dismantle all the armed gangs that are responsible for the death of hundreds of innocent Palestinians over the past few years.

What is happening on the U.S. campuses is not about supporting the Palestinians as much as it is about promoting hatred for the Jewish state. It is not really about ending the “occupation” as much as it is about ending the existence of Israel.

Frightened? Read the whole thing here.

The danger of verbiage

March 27, 2009

Reporters, myself included, tend to fall into use of hastily created phrases that become part of our verbiage. Israeli analyst Barry Rubin points out some of the offending phrases in the following column:

It's Worse Than a Crime, It's Blundering Analysis
By Barry Rubin
March 21, 2009

The problem, as we see repeatedly, with much media coverage of issues involving Israel is the way the story is defined. There need not be any sense of bias by a reporter. Merely copying what other journalists do or from a specific ideological framework—not because reporters have preconceptions but because they make far less effort than in the past to balance them—leads to a conception of the story that is skewed.

This appears subtly in news stories but very openly in analysis pieces. Consider Steven Gutkin, “Analysis: Mideast peace up to interlocking deals,” March 16, 2009. The lead is innovative but a bit clunky: “The fate of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become a collection of moving parts that somehow need to come together in a single package: an Israel-Hamas prisoner swap, a truce for Gaza, and new governments on both sides of the firing line that could pursue peace.”

There is an attempt to present the issue as involving a number of aspects. Yet the article mixes two very different things: the situation between Israel and Hamas regarding Gaza, and prospects for a comprehensive peace. In a very real sense, these are not related or, to put it another way, they are inversely related.

The undercover assumption here is that the more peace there is between Israel and Hamas, the more likely a comprehensive peace becomes. In fact, the first would damage the second. The reason why should be obvious: Hamas is against any compromise peace but favors long-term, bloody struggle using terrorism. If Hamas survives as ruler in Gaza, and even more damaging if the Palestinian Authority and Hamas make a coalition, the chances for a comprehensive peace—low enough already—decline to zero. All-out war is guaranteed.

The article next discusses the ups-and-downs of Israel-Hamas negotiations over a prisoner exchange and continues: “Such a swap could have helped pave the way for a long-term Israel-Hamas truce deal that in turn might have opened the Gaza Strip's blockaded borders to allow for reconstruction after Israel's punishing offensive there.”

This can be summarized as: truce brings open borders brings reconstruction to repair damage caused by Israel.

The words “rockets” or the phrase cross-border attacks do not appear in the article. There is no hint that Hamas aggression is the cause of conflict, nor that the fighting started because Hamas unilaterally rejected the existing truce (which it wasn’t enforcing any way). Equally, there is no mention that the issue is not just opening the borders but what is allowed to go across them, nor that there is some problem with rebuilding things in order to benefit a radical and repressive Islamist regime to keep it in power.

Thus the story is this: Israel attacked and destroyed Gaza, let’s have a truce so it can be rebuilt.

And who do you think that places the blame on?

Then we turn to an equally important—and misexplained—subject: “Rebuilding Gaza will almost surely also depend on the success of current reconciliation talks in Egypt between Hamas militants and the Western-backed Fatah movement in efforts to reverse the results of a brief 2007 civil war that left rival Palestinian governments in Gaza and the West Bank.”

At least the reporter wrote “Western-backed” rather than moderate, though no hint is given that the civil war was started by Hamas. It was a rather one-sided civil war.

Yet next comes a truly terrible and profoundly misleading sentence: “Getting Hamas and Fatah to reconcile is also key to the success of U.S.-backed Mideast peace talks, as it's unlikely Israel would sign on to a deal if moderates are in control of just the West Bank while militants rule Gaza. The latest news from Egypt is that the Hamas-Fatah talks are not going well.”

Well, where to begin? While it is true that Israel understandably wants to sign a peace deal only with a united Palestinian side which can deliver on its pledges, putting Hamas and Fatah together will ensure no such deal can ever be signed.

There is no hint in this article of why the word “militants” is used to describe Hamas. A lot of people critique the media for not using the word “terrorists” I don’t agree. Terrorism is a tactic and Hamas uses terrorism yet that does not encompass the organization’s views or goals. I’d prefer to see such phrases as: radical Islamist or determined to wipe Israel off the map or repressive, or even genocidal.

But the implication is not that Hamas would block peace—much less that the Palestinian Authority would—for we are next told: “The biggest question now is whether Israel would sign a deal under any circumstances. Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu, a political hawk, early Monday initialed a coalition agreement with the ultranationalist Yisrael Beitenu Party, increasing the likelihood that Israel's next government will spurn peace talks.”

“The bottom line is that the obstacles to Palestinian unity, open borders for Gaza and a peace deal that would usher in Palestinian statehood seem as formidable as ever.”
Note that there has not been one phrase or sentence to suggest that Hamas or Fatah or the PA are obstacles, only Israel. The Palestinians problem is just that they cannot unite, not that they oppose peace.

By the way, from a purely analytical point of view it should be pointed out that the reason PA-Hamas talks don’t go well is that both want to be in command, while Hamas is not going to give up control of Gaza. There isn’t going to be any Palestinian unity at all. You can bet on it.

And of course both Netanyahu and the Yisrael Beitenu party support a two-state solution.

But that one sentence is so important let me repeat it: “The bottom line is that the obstacles to Palestinian unity, open borders for Gaza and a peace deal that would usher in Palestinian statehood seem as formidable as ever.”

So this is what is allegedly needed for peace:
---Palestinian unity (in which Hamas would veto any peace);
--Open borders for Gaza (which would not only make Hamas rule permanent but would allow in items used for military purposes so Hamas could build up its army).
--“A peace deal that would usher in Palestinian statehood”

As always, there is no mention of a peace deal that would: end the conflict forever, bring full recognition of Israel, or provide Israel with security structures and guarantees.

This is the standard practice of AP and a lot of the media. What Israel wants in a peace deal is never ever mentioned.

The rest of the article discusses the prisoner exchange using such phrases as “Israel's crushing economic blockade of Gaza” and “bloody Israeli military offensive in Gaza.” No criticism of Hamas; no mention of rockets; no mention of repression and executions of oppositionists in Gaza.

And we are told: “Hamas is desperate to reopen the area's borders to allow in reconstruction supplies.” This makes Hamas seem humanitarian. But usually those who are desperate are ready to make concessions to get what they need. This is not true in Hamas’s case.

And finally, the ending: “If Hamas sticks by its refusal to recognize the Jewish state, as seems likely, a new right-wing Israeli government could use that as an excuse to shun a future Palestinian unity government, and perhaps even intensify the blockade of Gaza.”

Let us consider the full implications of this sentence: If Hamas says that it will never recognize Israel, will continue to attack Israel, does continue to attack Israel, teaches children to be terrorists, and has the goal of wiping Israel off the map, this merely gives Israelis of the “right-wing” an “excuse” to be mean to them.

Can people really be writing this kind of drivel, the slightest examination of which shows its absurdity? Can the AP and other news organs sneeringly reject any criticisms and assert that this is fair and balanced and good and accurate coverage?

Yes.

But is this fair, balanced, accurate, and accurate coverage?

No.