Palestinian and international human rights activists on Wednesday petitioned the United Nations to stop the construction of a Museum of Tolerance on the site of a medieval Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem, saying it would disturb centuries-old graves.

Campaigners said they are turning to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights after Israel’s Supreme Court rejected a 2008 appeal to stop the Simon Wiesenthal Center building its museum on part of the Mamilla cemetery.

“We have nowhere else to go,” Rania Madi of the Palestinian rights group BADIL told reporters in Geneva, where the petition was filed. Any response from the U.N.’s top rights official would carry only moral weight and is not legally binding.

The group said construction of the museum would violate Muslim religious and cultural rights, and such a project would never have been undertaken if the site was home to Jewish graves.

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Palestinian security forces detained six radical Islamists with explosives in the West Bank in the first known arrests of al Qaeda-inspired militants in the territory, a senior Palestinian officer said.

In the Gaza Strip, controlled by a separate, Hamas-run administration, the authorities announced the arrest of a leader of a pro-al Qaeda group, the latest sign of a crackdown on radicals accused of bombing security offices and Internet cafes.
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Hamas security officials cited 12 bombings which they believed were carried out by radical movements in recent weeks, the highest number of such attacks since Hamas took over the Gaza Strip.

Vehicles belonging to two Hamas officials and the office of a Hamas security service were blown up in the bombings. There were no casualties.

The Hamas-run Interior Ministry said the head of a fundamentalist group known as the Jaljalat was arrested late on Tuesday and that several other members of groups supporting al Qaeda were detained in recent days. “A preliminary investigation linked (him) to several if not all of the bombing attacks against security offices and personnel and Internet cafes. He is being interrogated,” said Ehab al-Ghsain, spokesman for the Hamas-run Interior Ministry.

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Israel said Monday that it will build nearly 700 new apartments in east Jerusalem, drawing tough criticism from both the Palestinians and the United States, which denounced the plan as an obstacle to peacemaking.

“We make a distinction between the West Bank and Jerusalem. Jerusalem is our capital and remains such,” said government spokesman Mark Regev.

Also, here’s a report from the AP about the Institute of Hope, the only orphanage in Gaza. It is home to many of the 1,720 new orphans that were created by last year’s Gaza masssacre.

No wonder Hamas has kicked Al Qaeda and the caliphate utopians out the Gaza Strip. No doubt they would make short work of sacrificing the Palestinians on the caliphate altar.

Of course, there are other huge differences between Hamas and Hezbollah and Al Qaeda and the militant groups of South Asia that it colonized.

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Family members said the troops entered without warning and killed the men in cold blood, insisting that none had resisted arrest or fired any shots.

The Israelis don’t even bother to make up stories about being shot at any more. They do claim that one of the men was armed.

The shootings were likely retaliatory violence for the shooting of an Israeli settler on Thursday by Palestinian gunmen.

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This would be a huge development in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that would potentiate change, though it’s hard to know what or how much change is possible given the current political climate in Israel.

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An irate Israel slammed the European Union on Tuesday for the group’s planned proposal to call for east Jerusalem to be named the capital of a future Palestinian state, dividing what Tel Aviv labels its “eternal capital.”
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The document is also said to “imply” that the EU will recognize a unilateral Palestinian declaration of statehood, a move which the Palesitnian Authority said last month they would seek from the United Nations.

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If Abbas decides to forgo the chairmanship before the elections take place, his successor by default is speaker of the Parliament – Hamas lawmaker Aziz Dweik.

Dweik, 59, is not slated to run in the elections as a Hamas candidate. The likely candidate would be Isma’il Haniyya, the current prime minister of the de facto Hamas government in the Gaza Strip. But the very notion of a Hamas leader heading the Palestinian Authority is in itself a symbolic victory for the Islamist movement, and a hair-raising option for Israel and Fatah.

The Palestinian Central Elections Commission announced on Thursday that it did not have the capacity to hold elections on January 24, as originally planned, effectively postponing the elections indefinitely.

How would Fatah respond:

A Hamas figure in power is certainly not something that Fatah would take lightly.

“You’re talking about a rival from a party which carried out a coup in Gaza, a party that is refusing to sign the Egyptian reconciliation paper that Fatah signed,” Dr Milhem said. “So you’re talking about conceding to Hamas. For Fatah this is not acceptable at all.”

Actually, I think it was Fatah that held the coup, not Hamas.

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“Turntables are in fact musical instruments,” Danish turntablist Martin Jakobsen explains at his Gemmayze flat the night before the start of a series of DJ workshops for Palestinian youth called: “Turntables in the Camps.”

“This is our first time in Lebanon, and Den Sorte Skole – the three-man DJ crew that I’m repping – we want to introduce the idea that there is this global DJ culture that Palestinian youth can take part in; a culture that doesn’t exclude them in the ways that they are excluded from Lebanese society, and that through turntablism, we can teach them to use sounds from their own lives to create music.”

Jakobsen told NOW Lebanon he was not sure what to expect out of the process, but he said, “I am realistic – I know that it’s not going to save anyone – but these workshops are a way of saying to them – ‘Hey, everyone can be a DJ – and, ‘You don’t need all this fancy shit’ – especially if we’re investing the equipment for them to come and experiment on from time to time.”

Jakobsen’s compatriot, Simon Dokkedal, the crew’s scratch specialist, waxes a little more street on the matter. “We training the next generation of sound pirates!” adding, “Hopefully we’ll plant the seeds here, and from this we can create a new generation of hip-hop DJ’s here in the camps.”

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Israel savored a victory on Sunday after U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton hailed his “unprecedented” position on settlements and back tracked from a previous call for a complete freeze to settlement construction before possible peace talks with the Palestinians.

“There is no question that the United States are our staunchest friends and that Israel’s firm stance on its positions pays off,” Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon told public radio on Sunday in a satisfied tone echoed by other officials.

The Israelis had reason to be satisfied.

In a joint press conference held, unusually, before talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pressed for negotiations to be restarted as soon as possible, despite the Palestinian insistence — which Washington backed only a few months ago — that Israel must first put a stop to all settlement activity in the occupied West Bank.

Sigh. Rewarding the Israelis for being obstinate and disagreeable will yield more of the same in the future. Sucks to be you Mrs. Clinton.

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I don’t want to recount the whole interview, you can watch it. I have to say, I was blown away. Although I was laughing out loud for the first two segments, I was on the verge of tears throughout the interview. Here was a Palestinian leader demanding equal rights and an anti-Zionist Jew calling for boycott, divestment and sanctions to pressure Israel towards peace on The Daily Show and they were being applauded, while the traditional pro-Israel hasbara was being shown the door.

Palestinian equal rights was placed directly next to health care and the economy on The Daily Show’s progressive agenda and the audience was totally along for the ride. I could hardly believe my eyes, and yet it made perfect sense at the same time. Who can argue that it is necessary to deny people water? Who can argue against equal rights? The answer is increasingly no one, and if The Daily Show’s audience is any indication, the next generation will be leading this fight in a much different direction.

Follow the link above to see the full, unedited segment.

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