[Notes below by Tom Gross]

TEACHING SCHOOLGIRLS, EGYPTIAN-STYLE

An Egyptian teacher has a not so subtle way of encouraging students to do their homework.

The video gets worse as it progresses.

Please note how the girls are subjected to more brutality than the boys.

Tom Gross adds:

A female Egyptian journalist narrowly survived being gang-raped while covering a demonstration two days ago on Cairo’s central Tahrir Square against the new Egyptian military government, local media reported.

The journalist was interviewing participants in Friday’s rally when a quarrel broke out between them. The attackers had torn the journalist’s clothes to pieces before a police officer managed to intervene. That police office was then attacked by the mob and doctors say his condition is now critical.

In March, in a similar incident close by the same location, a female American journalist was gang-raped.

 

TWO SYRIAN MEN ARE SAVAGELY BEATEN BY ASSAD’S SECURITY FORCES

Here is another video from Syria, showing two men being beaten up by Assad’s security forces. The beating gets increasingly worse as the video continues. The brave person filming this on his or her cellphone also risked torture and possible death in doing so.

Among past recent video dispatches on Syria, please see here and here.

Of course, there is nothing new in such violence by the Assad family dictatorship. It has been the daily diet of Syrian citizens for over 48 years: children being tortured, women shot at close range, kidnappings and detentions en masse, and so on.

It is just that resource-rich news media like The New York Times and the BBC have refused to cover this properly, and their Middle East correspondents and op-ed page columnists and leader writers have been much more interested in dragging Israel through the mud instead.

None of this has been unknown to these journalists. For example, as I pointed out again in a recent article (Syria’s Assad is worse than Gaddafi in many ways), the U.S. State Department’s most recent report on Syria (2009) says the regime was responsible for the “arbitrary or unlawful deprivation of life” and “enforced disappearances” and the vanishing of “an estimated 17,000 persons.”

The State Department report described the methods of torture inflicted on those unfortunate to find themselves in Syria’s prisons: “Electrical shocks; pulling out fingernails; burning genitalia; forcing objects into the rectum; beating, sometimes while the victim was suspended from the ceiling; other times on the soles of the feet.”

And all this was a regular occurrence before the present uprising when the situation got even worse, with the arrest and torture of tens of thousands of people, and the murder of at least 1200 civilians so far.

 

BRITISH MUSLIMS FOR ISRAEL

Of course, while many BBC and Guardian-types in Britain claim that all Muslims oppose Israel, there are a sizable number that support her.

Below is a recent interview with Hasan Afzal, a spokesman for “British Muslims for Israel”.

Hasan Afzal (who is a subscriber to this email list) is interviewed here on Israel’s Channel 10 news. One has to watch this British citizen on Israeli TV because it is highly unlikely that he would ever be allowed to express his views freely on the British-taxpayer funded BBC, given their prejudices. (Indeed over the years, I too have been interviewed about the Middle East on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, NPR and elsewhere, but the world’s biggest news organization, the BBC, from my home country, has never allowed me on air to speak about the Middle East.)

 

TOO REPULSIVE TO SHOW

I have watched the video showing the tortured, mutilated remains of the 13-year-old Syrian schoolboy Hamza Ali al-Khateeb. But I have chosen not to post it, because it is too gruesome to watch and out of respect for Hamza. The boy lies on a plastic sheet, the eyes of his bruised and swollen, purple face clenched shut. The rest of his young body is a mass of bloated flesh, scarred by welts and cigarette burns, slashes and bullet holes. His knees and elbows are broken. His penis has been cut off.

This is President Assad’s security forces at work on their own children.

And in the meantime the British, French and other governments haven’t even summoned Assad’s ambassadors to complain, let alone expelled them.

Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, 13, had his penis cut off and was then tortured to death by the Syrian security forces

 

“THE ONE STATE SOLUTION FOR A BETTER MIDDLE EAST: LET THE JEWS RUN THE WHOLE PLACE”

Although this video is largely tongue-in-cheek, it does contain various serious points. (The narrator is the American author and screenwriter of “tough-guy” mysteries, Andrew Klavan.)

 

“WE ARE THE PEOPLE, FREEDOM FOR PALESTINE”

One might expect politically idiotic pop stars to be duped into becoming involved in a slick piece of propaganda like this new video (below), replete with lies and stereotypes (among those reportedly promoting the video are the British band Coldplay) but perhaps more shocking is that this seems to have been partially funded by European taxpayers. Among those “charities” behind this video appear to have been War on Want, which receives funding from the EU, the U.K. Government Department for International Development, Irish Aid and others. (Among several past related dispatches, please see War on Want wages War on Israel.)

Freedom for Palestine. Nothing, apparently, about real apartheid states like Bahrain, or prison states like Syria, or for that matter, the Malvinas Islands, or Ceuta and Melilla, or Nagorno-Karabakh or hundreds of other disputed territories around the world. Only Palestine commands the attention of British celebrities.

 

ETHIOPIAN JEW SINGS ARABIC SONG ON ISRAELI TV TALENT SHOW

New Israeli singing sensation Hagit Yasu

21-year old Hagit Yasu, an Israeli Ethiopian Jew, gave a highly popular performance last weekend on Israel’s “A Star is Born” talent show.

She is singing a song in Arabic, called “From the day you left”, which I am told was written by Shim’on Busqila and composed by Idan Reichel, both Israeli Jews. Hagit is from the Israeli town of Sderot which has been subjected to more rocket attacks on civilians than any other town on the planet in recent years.

But those attacks, celebrated in the Arab world, haven’t stopped Israelis celebrating Arab language and culture.

 

ISRAEL’S INDEFENSIBLE BORDERS

This video, by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, explains why most political parties in Israel from left to right, would never countenance a return to the 1967 armistice lines, lines from which Israel cannot defend itself.

 

IRANIAN COMMANDOS ATTACK...

Iranian commandos attack...

...satellite dishes

This was filmed last week (on May 27) as the regime in Tehran once again tries to stop people tuning in to news broadcasts from abroad.

For my own recent interview with Iranian opposition media, please see here.