Human Rights Watch issued a 90-page report yesterday on Israeli occupation policies affecting Palestinian residency rights in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israel has arbitrarily denied thousands of Palestinians the ability to live in, and travel to and from, those areas, says the rights group.

“Israel should immediately stop denying or cancelling the residency of Palestinians and close family members with deep ties to the West Bank and Gaza, and end blanket bans on processing their applications for residency,” Human Rights Watch recommends.

Israel’s control of the population registry has profound implications for Palestinian life, according to a Human Rights Watch press release accompanying the new report:

Israel requires Palestinians to be included in the population registry in order to be considered lawful residents and obtain Israeli-approved identification cards and passports. In the West Bank, Palestinians need the ID cards to travel internally, including to schools, jobs, hospitals, and to visit family, because Israeli security forces manning checkpoints require these cards before allowing passage. Israeli officials, who control all West Bank borders, also require Palestinians entering or leaving the territory to present an identification card or passport.

In many cases, arbitrary policy changes have divided families: Israeli border officials have denied entry to the West Bank to Palestinians from Gaza, even if they had previously lived there or are close relatives of West Bank Palestinians, and to foreign-born spouses, and have denied re-entry to people living in the West Bank who have traveled abroad. In Gaza, where Egypt controls the southern border, Egyptian officials also continue to demand that Palestinians present such documents in order to leave and enter Gaza.

In September 1967, Israel conducted a census in the West Bank and Gaza three months after it occupied these territories, counting 954,898 Palestinians who were physically present. The census excluded at least 270,000 Palestinians who had been living there before the 1967 war but were absent during the census, either because they had fled during the 1967 war or were abroad for study, work, or other reasons. Israel did not include these Palestinians in the population registry and shortly afterwards prevented many of them, including all men aged 16 to 60, from returning, stating that they were ineligible to apply for residency.

Israel also struck from the registry thousands of Palestinians who traveled and stayed abroad for long periods; from 1967 to 1994, it did this to 130,000 West Bank Palestinians, thereby preventing them from living in the territory as legal permanent residents. A survey conducted in 2005, on behalf of the Israeli rights group B’Tselem, estimated that more than 640,000 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza had a parent, sibling, child, or spouse who was unregistered.

Israel further tightened its restrictions on Palestinian residency in September 2000, at the beginning of the second Palestinian “intifada,” or uprising. It barred Palestinians whom it had not registered as West Bank residents from entry there, and similarly barred unregistered Palestinians from entering Gaza, where it completely controlled all border crossings, to both Israel and Egypt, until 2005.

Also beginning in 2000, Israel refused to process applications for registration and residency by unregistered Palestinians, their spouses, and close relatives, even if they had lived in the West Bank or Gaza for years and had families, homes, jobs, or other ties there.

Israel also barred entry to the West Bank to virtually all Palestinians whom it had registered as residents of the Gaza Strip and refused to allow Palestinians living in the West Bank, but registered in Gaza, to change their registered addresses to the West Bank. Around 35,000 of these “Gazans” had entered and resided in the West Bank using temporary permits that have expired, according to Israeli military records. Under Israeli military orders, they are now considered unlawful “infiltrators” in their own homes.

Since 1967, thousands of spouses or close relatives of registered Palestinians had moved to the West Bank and applied for residency status through a process known as family reunification. However, Israel processed such applications slowly, often imposing low annual quotas and using arbitrary criteria that failed to take into account genuine familial or historical ties, until it stopped processing such applications altogether in 2000.

Since 2000, unregistered Palestinians who traveled abroad have been systematically denied re-entry when they tried to return to the West Bank; those who remained inside the West Bank are at the mercy of soldiers at checkpoints, who have in some cases detained them for residing there “unlawfully.”

Israeli authorities have justified these policy changes by arguing that the second Palestinian intifada resulted in a “breakdown” in cooperation with the Palestinian Authority (PA), which in 1995 took on the role of transferring the applications for registration to the Israeli side for approval. In fact, the PA continued to send the applications, but the Israeli side refused to process them. Israel received as many as 120,000 such applications from 2000 to 2005 that it did not process. Israel’s policy of refusing to process applications for family reunification has continued long after the ending of the second intifada.

From 2007 to 2009, Israel processed some 33,000 registration applications as what it called a political gesture during peace talks with the PA, and in 2011, it allowed around 2,800 Palestinians registered as residents of Gaza to change their addresses to the West Bank. These steps have not cleared the backlog. Israel has argued that it has no obligation to process Palestinian applications related to the population registry, but may do so at its discretion. In cases where Israeli rights groups have petitioned against these policies, the Israeli authorities have argued, and the courts have accepted, that since the blanket restrictions are a political matter tied to Israel’s relations with the PA, Israeli courts are not competent to adjudicate them.

One family’s story

Writing for The Electronic Intifada from Doha in 2010, Mohammad Alsaafin harrowingly described the impact Israel’s racist residency policies has had on his immediate family:

My dad was born in the Gaza Strip in 1962, the son of refugees, and left to the United Kingdom along with his wife and first son (myself) in 1990 to pursue his PhD at the University of Bradford. By 2004, I had a brother and two sisters, and our entire family moved back to Palestine, this time to the town of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. My father was working as a foreign journalist licensed by the Israeli Government Press Office and we were living in our country on yearly renewable Israeli work visas.

In 2005, I was turned back by Israeli border agents at the Sheikh Hussein Bridge as I attempted to cross into Jordan to visit my aunt. The agents told me that since I was born in the Gaza Strip in 1988 I had been issued a Gaza ID by the Israeli occupation authority and was therefore not allowed to legally reside in the West Bank. Additionally, I was informed that from then on, Israel would not recognize my British passport. I was able to return to Ramallah that day, but for the next four years I risked daily arrest by Israeli troops on the way to Birzeit University, where I was studying, and for a year after that while I was working in Ramallah. This summer, I left the West Bank to find work abroad, and was told by the Israelis that I would not be allowed to return home.

Despite this reprehensible situation, the rest of the family was thankfully spared such hardship. My dad continued working relatively unhindered as he moved across what is now Israel, the occupied West Bank and Gaza, and my mother and siblings enjoyed freedom of movement across the West Bank and inside Israel. This all changed very suddenly last August when, on a routine trip to Gaza where my dad had several assignments and where he wanted to visit his ailing father, he was detained by Israeli security at the Erez checkpoint, and was harassed, stripped of his press credentials and told — as I was four years earlier — that his British passport was worthless in Israel. He was also informed that he too had an Israeli-issued Gaza ID and thus would be treated as a Gazan, deprived of the most basic freedom of choice and movement and barred from ever returning to his wife and children in Ramallah. He was sent into Gaza, where he appealed to Israeli rights organizations, and as a British citizen to the British consulate and to former Prime Minister Tony Blair, now the Quartet’s Middle East envoy, for the right to leave Gaza and see his wife and children, if only for a day. The Israeli organizations were unable to help, the consulate was unable to circumvent a wall of Israeli bureaucracy, and Tony Blair chose to ignore our letter calling for assistance. In order to save his job, my dad had to give up hope of being allowed back into the West Bank, and left Gaza through Egypt in December.

At the time that my dad was stripped of his press credentials and work visa, my mother and siblings back in Ramallah were forced to accept their own Israeli-issued ID cards. Incredibly, my mother was given a Gaza ID despite being born abroad, raised in the West Bank and still owning a copy of her original West Bank ID! She now lives in constant fear of arrest and deportation by Israeli troops; if she were to leave the West Bank she would also be banned from returning to our family and home in Ramallah.

Meanwhile my brother and sister, who were both born in the UK and are now university students, have bizarrely been issued with West Bank ID cards, even though their parents and older brother were given Gaza IDs.

As a result of all of this, our family has been torn apart. My father is finally out of Gaza, but he is unable to see his children unless they travel abroad to meet him. My mother is in the West Bank, afraid to even leave Ramallah and risk being detained and deported at an Israeli army checkpoint. She is unable to leave the West Bank while my father and I are unable to enter. We don’t know how long it will be before we can see each other again — the Israeli authorities have said that they will not change my mother’s ID.

Mohammad’s mother describes her family’s plight in the above video which Human Rights Watch released along with the new report:
Sorce: http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen/human-rights-watch-israel-must-stop-tearing-palestinian-families-apart?utm_source=EI+readers&utm_campaign=38fd6f591e-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email

AMMAN: Jordanian Islamists on Sunday called on Muslims and Arabs to boycott Russian and Chinese products after the two countries vetoed a UN Security Council resolution condemning Syria’s regime over bloodshed.

“By vetoing the resolution, Russia and China have shown that they are taking part in the killing of Syrian people,” Hammam Said, the leader of the powerful Muslim Brotherhood, said on the group’s website.

“All Muslims and Arabs should boycott Russian and Chinese products in order to support the Syrian people, who demand freedom and dignity. The vetoes were against all Arabs and Muslims.”

Said described the crackdown, which rights groups say has killed more than 6,000 people since democracy protests broke out in March last year, as “almost the worst in recent history.”

Russia and China on Saturday used their diplomatic muscle for the second time in four months to block a resolution condemning the violence.

The other 13 countries in the 15-member council voted for the resolution, proposed by European and Arab nations to give strong backing to an Arab League plan to end the crackdown.

Read more: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2012/Feb-05/162226-muslims-urged-to-boycott-russia-china-goods.ashx#ixzz1lZFC9oBr
(The Daily Star :: Lebanon News :: http://www.dailystar.com.lb)

(CNN) — Europe and the Muslim world seem to be on a collision course that could have major political, economic and ideological ramifications. January 23, 2012, may well come to be remembered as the crucial date when Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis, which many of us believed discredited beyond repair, was reaffirmed.

Political scientist Huntington wrote in 1993 that cultural divisions preclude a defining global civilization, and the West and the Muslim world would never share the same values.

Last month, Europe took two different actions that nonetheless sent the same message to the Muslim world: You are not our equals and are doomed to be judged by standards different from those by which we judge ourselves. Future historians might call January 23 the day when Europe irreversibly alienated not one, but both, pivotal powers — Iran and Turkey — that in all probability will dominate the political landscape of the Middle East for several decades.

One action was the European Union’s decision to ban oil purchases from Iran, including imports of crude oil, petroleum products and petrochemical products, to force Tehran to negotiate away its uranium enrichment program, which Tehran insists is for civilian use only. This is the latest in a series of increasingly stringent sanctions that Western powers have unilaterally imposed on Iran. These sanctions go well beyond those required by the U.N. Security Council.
The EU sanctions attempt to hit the Iranian economy where it hurts most: Europe imports about a fifth of Iranian oil. When combined with a ban on transactions with Iran’s Central Bank, this action is aimed at paralyzing the Iranian economy.

At the same time, the French Senate passed a law making it a crime to deny genocides that are officially recognized by France. The two genocides in this category are the Holocaust and the killing of 1.5 million Armenians in Anatolia during the last years of the Ottoman Empire. Because the denial of the Holocaust is already a crime under French law, the obvious objective of the bill is to criminalize the denial of the 1915 Armenian genocide.

Sanctions hurting Iran economy

France passes Armenian genocide bill
The issue of Armenian genocide touches a very raw nerve in Turkey, which denies the scale of the killings — Turkey maintains that roughly 500,000 Armenians were killed — as well as the claim that it was planned. According to Turkey, the killings happened in the midst of the disarray accompanying World War I and the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey says a nearly equivalent number of Turks and Kurds were also killed in inter-ethnic strife with the Armenians, who were allied with the Ottoman’s Russian adversaries.

It’s not the accuracy of the opposing claims that is at issue; it’s Muslim perceptions. Iran may well be trying to develop nuclear weapons, and what amounts to an Armenian genocide may well have taken place. What roils Muslim opinion worldwide is the perception that the West uses blatant double standards to pass judgment.

Harsh sanctions on Iran are seen as an attempt to prevent a Muslim country from developing deterrents to attacks from Israel and the United States, both nuclear powers hostile to the Islamic Republic. Most Western discussions of the Iranian bomb do not make even passing reference to the well-documented Israeli nuclear capability, even as Israel threatens to militarily strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. This omission is seen as hypocritical, dishonest and self-serving.

For many in the Muslim world, double standards explain why France singled out Turkey, and didn’t criminalize the denial of other nations’ crimes against humanity. Although denying Germany’s crimes is a crime, the Holocaust is universally accepted as genocide, while Turkey’s is not.

Many ask why disputing European massacres of non-European people is not criminalized — such as the French actions in Algeria, as Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan has said. These would include the near-total extermination of native populations by European settlers in Australia, New Zealand, and North America.

They would include the killings of millions of people by the Belgian administration of the Congo Free State, whose population was halved during the early decades of Belgian rule. Most pertinent of all, Muslims ask, why not criminalize the denial of the genocidal Spanish Inquisition that led to the extermination, expulsion or conversion of the entire Muslim and Jewish populations of the Iberian peninsula?

Many Muslims perceive these moves as the West targeting Iran and Turkey in an attempt to prevent important Muslim countries from achieving the military capacity — Iran — and the political stature — Turkey — they deserve. Many see behind these moves the not-so-hidden hand of an ideology based on Huntington’s theory of the clash of civilizations. Although these perceptions may not fully conform with reality, it is well established that perceptions count much more than reality in the conduct of international relations.

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The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Mohammed Ayoob.
Source: http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/03/opinion/ayoob-clash-muslims-and-west/index.html

NEW YORK—Thirty-three civil rights groups from around the country complained to the New York attorney general Friday about police documents that showed the New York Police Department recommending increased surveillance of Shiite mosques based on their religion.

Raise Your Voice

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The letter urged Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to investigate NYPD’s surveillance operations, revealed by an Associated Press investigation, which monitored entire neighborhoods and built databases about everyday life in Muslim communities.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Mayor Michael Bloomberg have insisted that police only follow legitimate leads and do not conduct preventative surveillance in ethnic communities. A May 2006 report addressed to Kelly, however, recommended increased spying at mosques and an assessment of the region’s Palestinian community to look for potential terrorists.

Even before the AP published the document, Kelly was under fire from Muslim groups who were angry that a controversial movie about Muslims, “The Third Jihad,” was shown at NYPD training sessions. Kelly appears briefly in the movie.

About 150 protesters gathered near police headquarters Friday to challenge the NYPD’s tactics. “Don’t be afraid, stand for justice!” they chanted before holding evening prayers in nearby Foley Square.

“Just the fact of knowing there is someone out there trying to listen to my conversations that can turn me into some kind of criminal, which I’m not, and exploiting my religion, it hurts,” said Sondos Alsilwi, an 18-year-old history major at City College.

Schneiderman’s office did not immediately have a comment on the letter.

The Obama administration has made fighting homegrown terrorism a focus of its national security strategy but has repeatedly sidestepped questions about whether it endorses the NYPD’s tactics. Tom Perez, the U.S. Justice Department’s top civil rights prosecutor, has refused to even answer questions about the NYPD.

The 2006 intelligence report, entitled “US-Iran Conflict: The Threat to New York City,” made a series of recommendations to Kelly, including: “Expand and focus intelligence collections at Shi’a mosques.” It includes a list of mosques and community organizations stretching from southern New Jersey to Connecticut.

The NYPD’s operating rules prohibit it from basing investigations on religion. The NYPD also says it follows FBI guidelines, which would prohibit many of the steps recommended in the report.

But the NYPD faces little in the way of oversight when it comes to its intelligence programs. Both the City Council and Congress are kept in the dark about this secretive aspect of the department. Many first learned about the spying programs from news reports.

“The masses of people around this city are fed up with the police,” City Councilman Charles Barron told protesters Friday. “Who the hell do they think they are?”

On Thursday, Kelly downplayed the significance of the 2006 document, calling it a “contingency plan” for military conflict between the U.S. and Iran. Such language does not exist anywhere in the document.

Fears of such a conflict were rising again Friday amid concerns in the Middle East that Israel was preparing a military strike on Iran. Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned that an attack would only hurt the United States.

“A war itself will damage the U.S. 10 times over” in the region, “Khamenei said in a national broadcast Friday.

Iran is a majority Shi’a country, while most Muslims belong to the Sunni sect.

In August, when the AP first reported on the spying operations, Bloomberg said the NYPD doesn’t even consider religion as part of its police work.

“We don’t stop to think about the religion,” he said. “We think about the threats and focus our efforts there.”

Bloomberg spokesman Marc LaVorgna would not say whether the mayor still believes that.

——

Associated Press reporters Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman and Eileen Sullivan contributed to this article.

Online:

View the NYPD document: http://bit.ly/wYrAUX

——

Contact the Washington investigative team at DCinvestigations (at) ap.org

Follow Apuzzo, Goldman, Sullivan and Hawley at http://twitter.com/mattapuzzo, http://twitter.com/goldmandc, http://twitter.com/esullivanap, and http://twitter.com/chawley1
Source: http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2012/02/04/muslims_to_ny_attorney_general_investigate_nypd/

The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz has an article on the ad and Iran’s reaction to it here:

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/iran-mulls-ban-of-samsung-over-israeli-commercial-depicting-attack-on-nuclear-plant-1.410773

The commercial reveals the Israeli attitude about Mossad terror attacks in foreign nations. No other nation would produce a similar commercial in which their secret service blows up a nuclear plant in another nation. It’s unthinkable. The Israelis, however, think it’s funny.

The ad has several of the key elements of the false-flag terror attacks of 9/11. It features Israeli agents and Mossad operatives working undercover and using disguises, just like the 5 dancing Israelis who were arrested on 9/11 in New Jersey. These Mossadniks use computers to detonate pre-placed explosives to destroy an important asset. This is exactly what happened to the Twin Towers on 9/11. There is certainly nothing funny about Israeli terrorism. Just ask the 10,000 American children who lost their father or mother on 9/11.

Sources:

“Iran mulls ban of Samsung over Israeli commercial depicting attack on nuclear plant”, Ha’aretz, 3 February 2012

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/iran-mulls-ban-of-samsung-over-israeli-commercial-depicting-attack-on-nuclear-plant-1.410773

Source: Bollyn.com
Source: http://www.bollyn.com/israeli-tv-ad

CAIRO (Reuters) – The Arab world’s most famous comic actor, Adel Imam, has received a three-month jail sentence for insulting Islam in films and plays, a court document showed on Thursday.

Imam, who has frequently poked fun at authorities and politicians of all colors during a 40-year career, has one month to appeal the sentence and will remain out of jail until the appeal process is concluded.

The sentence Wednesday evening came weeks after Islamists swept most seats in a parliamentary election. The case was brought by Asran Mansour, a lawyer with ties to Islamist groups, and had languished in court for months, judicial sources said.

Mansour accused the actor of offending Islam and its symbols, including beards and the Jilbab, a loose-fitting garment worn by some Muslims, the Egyptian news portal Ahramonline reported.

Among films and plays targeted by the lawyer were the movie “Morgan Ahmed Morgan” and the play “Al-Zaeem” (“The Leader”), the report said.

Imam was also handed a fine of 1,000 Egyptian pounds ($170) in absentia, the court document showed. He could not immediately be reached for comment.

Court cases against directors, actors, artists and intellectuals for failing to respect religious authority are common in Egypt. But the case against Imam is likely to draw attention due to his high profile and the timing of the verdict.

Egypt’s most successful movie star, Imam has been a box-office sell-out for much of his career. His more serious films have dealt with the rise the Islamist militancy and taken aim at incompetent government officials.

“I think the lawyer who filed the case against Imam is taking advantage of the current circumstances with Islamists gaining power in Egypt,” said Nabil Abdel Fattah, an analyst and researcher at al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo.

He said the sentence had likely been handed down because Imam had failed to appear in court, and expected it to be overturned on appeal.

Egyptian telecom tycoon and political liberal Naguib Sawiris also faces trial on a charge of showing contempt for religion in a case brought by another Islamist lawyer. Sawiris, a prominent figure in Egypt’s Coptic Christian community, was accused of showing contempt by tweeting a cartoon seen as insulting to Islam.

($1 = 6.0285 Egyptian pounds)

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/02/us-egypt-actor-jail-idUSTRE8111AJ20120202

February 2, 2012

PEMBROKE PINES

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La-Fleur Mohamed, a Muslim for the past 12 years, says a Chevron employee humiliated her by barring her from a gas station because she wouldn’t remove her head scarf.

“You can’t come in here dressed like that,” Mohamed said the clerk told her inside a station store west of Boca Raton in October. The clerk allegedly tossed Mohamed’s gas money back at her and instructed her to leave.

Mohamed, 39, a Boca Raton married mother of four, has since been receiving assistance from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights and advocacy group with chapters nationwide.

At a press conference in Pembroke Pines on Wednesday, she and the group demanded that Chevron officials admit that religious discrimination occurred. And they want Chevron to start additional training companywide so that such violations don’t happen again.

The group showed two letters from Chevron. The latest, dated Jan. 17, states the company reviewed the matter, didn’t see evidence of discrimination, but took “corrective action to address this issue.”

“The parties involved for my public humiliation need to take responsibility and accept that they did violate my rights and apologize,” Mohamed said.

Chevron spokesman Brent Tippen said Wednesday that Mohamed was asked by the employee to remove her veil, and when she declined, she was denied service.

But he said it was done for security just before Halloween, when retailers are prone to heists from people wearing masks and other facial coverings.

“We fully believe that our employee acted without the intent to violate Ms. Mohamed’s religious principles and any suggestion that discrimination is acceptable at Chevron is completely false,” he said.

Chevron, which employs 60,000 from around the world, has a policy that requires everyone be treated with respect and dignity, he said.

According to Tippen, the company regrets the misunderstanding. It has apologized twice to Mohamed, encouraged employees to “be more aware of potential diversity issues” and “continues to take Ms. Mohamed’s allegations seriously,” he said.

Mohamed, a native of St. Vincent in the Caribbean, pulled up to the station at 19345 U.S. 441 on Oct. 28, she said.

She said hello to the female worker, who appeared to be in her mid-20s, handed the worker $20 and asked if she could “please have $20 on Pump No. 1.”

After the worker declined to serve her, Mohamed collected her money and walked back to her car in tears, she said. Her parents were in the vehicle waiting for her, she said.

“I was so embarrassed to tell them that I was just denied service,” she said.

With her car’s fuel guage on empty, Mohamed said she was concerned that her car would run out of gas if she tried to drive to another station. She phoned 911.

When a Palm Beach sheriff’s deputy arrived, the deputy unsuccessfully tried to persuade the employee to provide service, she said.

A dispatch log from the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office confirms the agency responded, taking her report that the station was “refusing to give her gas because of her religion.” No additional action was taken by the Sheriff’s Office because it was a civil matter involving a private business, a sheriff’s spokesman said.

Mohamed phoned a friend to meet her at Chevron and accompany her to another station for gas, she said.

South Florida’s Council on American-Islamic Relations often receives reports of religious discrimination, but Mohamed’s encounter was one of “the most egregious” recent examples of refusal of service, said Nezar Hamze, the group’s regional executive director.

“It’s important that this is publicly vetted so that our society learns that this type of behavior is unacceptable and un-American,” Hamze said.

Wilfredo A. Ruiz, the group’s Florida legal counsel, questioned whether security was Chevron’s reason for declining service. He said security concerns no longer were a factor when a sheriff’s deputy also showed up to ask that Mohamed be provided service.

“This case goes beyond security,” Ruiz said.

Chevron’s Tippen replied that the deputy asked the clerk only why she was declining to provide service. The clerk explained she was following instructions to ask customers to remove facial coverings for the security camera.

Mohamed said she has lived in the United States for the past 25 years. She said she lived in New York and New Jersey before she and her family moved to South Florida for the warmer weather about eight years ago.

Mohamed said that over the years, she has drawn stares from the public for her traditional religious garb. She said she uses such moments to educate people about being a Muslim.

Her veil drew extra attention in July, when she was taken into custody on a domestic battery charge in Alachua County, accused of wrestling her daughter over a cellphone, according to an article posted online by the Gainesville Sun newspaper. It was her first and only arrest, and the charge was later dismissed, records show.

Her initial jail mugshot shows her wearing the veil. But she later was photographed again without the veil to show her face in accordance with jail policies, the newspaper reported.

The Chevron visit in Palm Beach County was the first time Mohamed was barred from getting service at a business, she said. She said she’ll never again visit the business.

“I don’t even drive by there,” she said.

Staff writer Jorge Valens and staff researcher Barbara Hijek contributed to this report.

jcortega@tribune.com or 954-356-4701
Source: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/state/fl-alleged-religion-discrimination-20120202,0,1867250,full.story

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: January 24, 2012
RYE, N.Y. (AP) — Fifteen Muslims won conditional dismissals on Tuesday of charges stemming from an amusement park disturbance that started when women were told they could not wear religious headscarves on some rides.
A Rye Town Court judge told the defendants that their cases would be dropped if they stayed out of trouble for two months. Most had been charged only with disorderly conduct, but the charges ranged up to second-degree assault.

All the female defendants wore headscarves.

Some of the defendants said after the court session that they planned to file a civil rights lawsuit against Westchester County, alleging police brutality and racism in the disturbance. The county owns Playland park in Rye, a national landmark, where the disturbance occurred.

Lamis Deek, a defense lawyer, said the defendants could have gone to trial and won acquittals, but trials would have been inconvenient because none of the defendants live in Westchester.

“It’s unfortunately more convenient to accept this offer, not have to enter a plea of guilty, move on with their lives and pursue this matter in a civil courtroom,” Ms. Deek said.

Lucian Chalfen, spokesman for the district attorney’s office, declined to comment on why the dismissals were accepted. Ms. Deek suggested that prosecutors felt they could not win convictions. She said the dismissals “speak loudly to what they think really happened.”

About 3,000 Muslims were at Playland on Aug. 30, celebrating the end of Ramadan, Islam’s holy month of fasting. Officials say Playland bans baseball caps, eyeglasses and other headgear on several rides for safety reasons.

County officials said at a hearing in September that some Muslim women who were wearing religious scarves known as hijabs objected when told they could not go on certain rides. They said the county had made the policy clear to the trip organizer, the Muslim American Society of New York.

They said dissatisfied patrons were being given refunds when scuffles broke out within the group. Ms. Deek said Tuesday that it was an argument just between two Muslim women.

The police were called, five people were arrested, and things began to calm down until a flash mob, summoned by texting, gathered rapidly outside the park police station, said Commissioner George Longworth of the county police. The crowd became unruly, and 10 more people were arrested.

Ms. Deek said the arrests were carried out with “a great deal of brutality,” injuring several Muslims.

“This is the result of stereotyping and racist ideologies and beliefs” toward Muslim communities, she said, “the idea that for some reason these Muslims would be more violent.”

Kieran O’Leary, a county police spokesman, said Tuesday that the arrests were “a lawful and necessary response to calm an escalating situation that could have put the safety of 6,000 Playland patrons at risk.”
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/25/nyregion/charges-against-muslims-dismissed-in-westchester-park-dispute.html?_r=1

Iraqis express outrage at US use of small fleet of surveillance drones to protect embassy, consulates, American personnel in Iraq.

Middle East Online – January 30, 2012
WASHINGTON – Iraqi officials have expressed outrage at the United States’ use of a small fleet of surveillance drones to help protect the US embassy, consulates and American personnel in Iraq, The New York Times reported late Sunday.

The newspaper said the State Department began operating some drones in Iraq last year on a trial basis and stepped up their use after the last US troops left the country in December.

The US government plans to take bids for the management of drone operations in Iraq over the next five years, the report said.

The State Department drones carry no weapons and are meant to provide data and images of possible hazards, like public protests or roadblocks, to security forces on the ground, the paper noted. They are much smaller than armed drones.

But the US government needs formal approval from Iraq to use such aircraft there, the paper noted, citing unnamed Iraqi officials.

Such approval may be hard to get given the political tensions between the two countries, The Times said.

A senior American official said negotiations were under way to obtain authorization for the drone operations, but Ali al-Mosawi, a top adviser to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki; Iraq’s national security adviser, Falih al-Fayadh; and the acting minister of interior, Adnan al-Asadi, all said in interviews that they had not been consulted by the Americans, the report said.

“Our sky is our sky, not the USA’s sky,” Asadi is quoted by the paper as saying.

The US Embassy, built on 104 acres of land, is supposedly called by the local Iraqis the “George W. Bush Palace”.

The Embassy in Baghdad is the largest and most expensive of any embassy in the world. At 0.44 square kilometers it is nearly as large as Vatican City. It also employs 15,000 people and cost $750 million to build.

The Embassy opened in January 2009 following a series of construction delays. It replaced the previous embassy, which opened July 1, 2004 in Baghdad’s Green Zone in a former Palace of Saddam Hussein.
Source: http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=50342