The Egyptian army could certainly act, and there are several thousand Egyptian troops currently in the Sinai. I suspect this is a special joint mission between Egyptian troops and the Bedouin to shakedown a pay-offout from the hotel owner and who better to blame than the Joos.

The Jerusalem Post:

The Palestinians on Tuesday welcomed as “historic” a decision by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe [PACE] to grant the PLO’s parliament-in-exile, the Palestinian National Council [PNC], the status of “Partner for Democracy.” The new status, which is reserved for parliamentarians from countries neighboring the Council of Europe, enables members of the PNC to speak before the PACE assembly and most of its committees.

The Iranians are far more deserving of partnership status than the Palestinians, and at least the Iranians do regularly hold elections – even if the fix is in. Meanwhile the Palestinians are lead by a man whose term of office expired over two years ago and who has post-poned elections – indefinitely.

“They [Israelis] know for certain that our [Palestinian] roots are deeper than their false history. We, from the balcony of our home, look out over [Islamic] holiness and on sin and filth (Jews’ praying at Western Wall) in an area that used to have [Arab] people and homes. We are drawing our new maps. When they [Israelis] disappear from the picture, like a forgotten chapter in the pages of our city’s history, we will build it anew (residential area). The Mughrabi Quarter will be built here (on the Western Wall Plaza).

The television network of the so-called ‘moderate’ Palestinians. Now according to a certain blogger of my acquaintance, accusing the Palestinians of “anti-Semitism or racism, is a stretch. To put it mildly.” For some strange reason ’stretch’ isn’t the word which comes to mind when I think Palestinian anti-Semitism. As rampant as Jewish anti-Semitism has been for centuries within the Arab world; what I find far more disturbing is those who enable Palestinian racism and prejudice by giving it a complete pass.

Update: Since Dr. Dawg just can’t seem to get it. Maybe a picture of the handiwork of the people he works so hard to provide moral cover will help him get it.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas met Thursday with a US Democratic Congressional delegation currently visiting the region, telling them that he is seeking a Palestinian state without settlements, Palestinian news agency WAFA reported.

The sound you will not hear is any progressive wavering in the cause of Palestinian statehood. When Leiberman talks transfer of Israel’s Arab minority to a potential future Palestinian state the progressive left works itself into a frenzy of denunciations of Lieberman’s racism, but have chairman Abbas call for a ‘Jew-free’ Palestinian state, and not even a dawg barks in protest. I have to hand it to the progressives who are unstinting in their calls of condemnation of the Israeli state for racism and so-called ‘apartheid’ policies but who do not have the slightest qualms in helping the Palestinians establish their own little corner of apartheid.

Two peoples, two different standards.

h/tip: The Muqata

CAIRO — Egypt’s powerful Muslim Brotherhood and the secular opposition banded together Sunday around a prominent government critic to negotiate for forces seeking the fall of President Hosni Mubarak, as the army struggled to hold a capital seized by fears of chaos and buoyed by euphoria that three decades of Mr. Mubarak’s rule may be coming to an end.

The announcement that the critic, Mohamed ElBaradei, would represent a loosely unified opposition reconfigured the struggle between Mr. Mubarak’s government and a six-day-old uprising bent on driving him and his party from power.

Though lacking deep support on his own, Dr. ElBaradei, a Nobel laureate and diplomat, could serve as a consensus figure for a movement that has struggled to articulate a program for a potential transition. It suggested, too, that the opposition was aware of the uprising’s image abroad, putting forth a candidate who might be more acceptable to the West than beloved in Egypt.

The Muslim Brotherhood just bought themselves a public secular face as a beard. And for those of you with little short term memory – let point out that it was during Dr. El Baradei’s watch at the International Atomic Energy Agency that the Iranians got away with creating a second parallel but ‘unmonitored’ nuclear program.

A few years ago I briefly visited the Balata refugee camp with its 20,000 residents. The camp is inside the West Bank city of Nablus—that is, within the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority (PA). It is where many of the Arabs of Jaffa settled when they fled the armed conflict that flared up immediately after the November 1947 UN partition resolution dividing Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. Most of Balata’s current residents are the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the original refugees. Thus, a new baby born in Balata today is still designated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) as a refugee dislocated by the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and hence entitled to substantial material benefits for life, or at least until the conflict is settled. That infant will grow up and attend a segregated school run by UNRWA. In UN schools and cultural clubs financed by American tax dollars, Balata’s children, like the children in similar camps in Gaza and neighboring Arab countries, are nurtured on the myth that someday soon they will return in triumph to their ancestors’ homes by the Mediterranean Sea.

While awaiting redemption, Balata’s Palestinian residents are prohibited, by the Palestinian Authority, from building homes outside the camp’s official boundaries. They do not vote on municipal issues and receive no PA funding for roads or sanitation. As part of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s “economic renaissance” and state-building project, a brand new Palestinian city named Rawabi is planned for the West Bank near Bethlehem. But there will be no room at the inn for the Balata refugees. Sixty years after the first Arab-Israeli war, Balata might accurately be defined as a UN-administered, quasi-apartheid, welfare ghetto.

This historical and political absurdity—unique in the experience of the world’s tens of millions of refugees displaced by modern war and political conflict—helps explain why Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas walked away from the best deal his people have ever been offered. It happened in November 2008, when Ehud Olmert, then the prime minister of Israel, presented him with a detailed map of a future Palestinian state that, with land swaps, would constitute close to 100 percent of the territory of the West Bank and Gaza prior to the June 1967 war. Olmert also offered to divide Jerusalem, enabling the Palestinians to locate their capital in the eastern half of the city. The only thing he would not agree to was a right of return for Palestinian refugees—for the obvious reason that this would mean the end of the Jewish state.

As I have reported elsewhere, Abbas, promising to come back for further discussions, took the map to his Ramallah office for his aides to study. But he never returned with the map, and this was the last time the Israeli and Palestinian leaders met. The reason, I believe, is clear: if Olmert’s offer had ever become the basis of serious negotiations, Abbas would have had to admit to the residents of Balata and the other refugee camps on the West Bank that their leaders had lied to them for 60 years and that they were not returning to Jaffa. Among those leaders was Abbas himself, who in his 2005 campaign for the PA presidency declared repeatedly that he would never bargain away the Palestinian refugees’ right of return.

(…)Why not, at long last, break up the awful refugee camps and encourage their residents to integrate themselves into West Bank civil society? The rationale for doing so is not merely political expediency. There is an overwhelming human-rights imperative to deal with the issue now. For the past decade, an array of peace and human-rights groups has been protesting Israel’s “brutal” West Bank occupation and the military checkpoints restricting the movement of innocent Palestinians. Now, many of the checkpoints have been closed, and Palestinians are building their economy and policing their own cities. In these circumstances, where are the human-rights advocates demanding that the Palestinian refugees be freed from their crowded camps, allowed to build their own homes anywhere on the West Bank, and permitted to send their children to regular Palestinian schools? Why aren’t peace demonstrators marshaling outside the Balata refugee camp with signs saying, “Mr. Abbas, tear down this wall”?

If I were to characterized Palestinian culture and isolate the element or flavour which makes it distinctively ‘Palestinian’ and sets it apart from other Arab cultures it would be in this way; No one – and I do mean no one – does ‘refugee’ like a Palestinian.

Of course, either the G&M or the T-Star could have run articles or op-ed pieces discussing the use of disproportionate use of force without blaming the Israelis and can we really have that? I would bet the farm if the Israelis were ‘found’ at fault the articles would still be running.

But, put all of that aside for a moment, and just concentrate on the Lebanese narrative because it is telling us something profound about the current Arab mentality towards the Israelis and suggests the real reason there will not be peace any time soon in the middle East has nothing to do with Israeli culture, mentality or intentions and owes more to do with an irrational sense of both grievance and entitlement on the part of the neighbors. If the Israelis cannot cut or trim the hedges within the borders of Israel without pushing the envelope; what hope can there be for peace?

Al-Arish – Ma’an – Egyptian security forces said 60 new and stolen cars en route to Gaza were seized by officers south of the border on Tuesday.

The cars, mostly BMW and Toyotas, were being dismantled and prepared for transport through a specially-made tunnel in Rafah’s Al-Duhnieh area, police said.

h/tip Israel Matzav

It’s catchy, nu?

h/tip The Rebbetzin’s Husband