“Peres’ lies made me cry,” the wife of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan charged in a meeting with Palestinian businesswomen Friday.
Amina Erdogan used the meeting, held at her Ankara home, to share her emotions during the infamous verbal clash between her husband and Israel’s president in Davos in December 2008, a short while after the launch of Operation Cast Lead.
“The incident in Davos (where Erdogan stormed off stage) was not planned in advance, but rather, followed the lies spread by Peres,” the Turkish PM’s wife was quoted as saying Saturday by the Palestinian al-Ayam paper and by the Saudi al-Watan paper. “I was saying: ‘My God, how can one face the whole world and lie…God, shut this man up.'”
The Turkish PM’s wife added that shortly thereafter she saw Erdogan lose his cool, adding that “later I too started to cry. I couldn’t hold myself up because of this crying. They asked me what happened and I said I was trying to reach Erdogan and that he (Peres) lied.”
“We reached our limit because Peres lied,” Amina Erdogan added. “We used to hold positions in support of peace.”
She added that Peres later called Erdogan to apologize.
As noted, Erdogan’s wife welcomed Palestinian businesswomen at her home Friday, lauding their activity in “facing Israel’s occupation.” She concluded the meeting by quoting Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish: “Palestine was, Palestine exists, and Palestine shall remain for all eternity.”
So now we know Shimon Peres made Amina Erdogan cry. The question is, did the horse’s kick to her husband’s testicles elicit the same response?
Updates (Israel time; most recent at top)
10:23PM: You can’t please everyone.
9:58PM: A senior UN diplomat has said the next session of the UN General Assembly, which opens in September, will “almost certainly be particularly unpleasant for Israel.”
In other words, business as usual.
7:15PM: An oldie but a goodie: Borat interviewed by an Israeli Barack Obama lookalike.
6:38PM: It looks like Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah has a Jewish father.
“I wanted him to be an engineer or a lawyer,” said Abu-Hassan, who claimed he had opposed his son’s religious studies in Iraq.
Jokes aside, here’s hoping he becomes fertilizer. Really soon.
4:50PM: Scenes from the all new Gaza mall!
4:08PM: The 15th annual Jerusalem festival that takes place at the Tomb of the Kings in eastern Jerusalem this coming week has a dual price structure – Tickets for Jews and Christians are 50 NIS per performance. Palestinians only get a special discount!
As Judy blogs:
Now this is an event with a prestigious list of sponsors: The Pontifical mission (the Vatican representative in Israel); the representative office of Norway to the Palestine Authority , the Spanish Cooperation Office, the French Consulate and French Cultural Center & Price Waterhouse West Bank & Gaza office.
Could you imagine any of these organizations sponsoring an event offering special discounts for Jews only?
Oh, and I almost forgot–the festival is billed as an event that will “bring joy and peace to Jerusalem.”
12:52PM: Ma’an News reports:
A new suspect involved in a telecommunication spy network fled Lebanon for Israel on Friday, a day after another suspect was detained, Lebanese media reported Sunday.
According to the Lebanese daily An-Nahar, the latest suspect was an employee of Lebanon’s Alfa telecommunications, identified only as NRMA.
The daily said that the alleged suspect escaped the country from the Aitaroun Gate in the Bint Jbeil district in southern Lebanon.
Police have arrested three suspects over the past month in an expanding probe into an alleged network of Israeli spies employed in the country’s telecom sector, the online news site NOW Lebanon reported.
In response, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Friday said Israel had complete control over Lebanon’s telecom sector, calling for convicted spies to be hanged amid a widening probe into acts of espionage.
Since April 2009, Lebanon has arrested more than 70 people on suspicion of spying for Israel, including security officials.
12:45PM: This next video will be instantly appreciated by Israelis.
For the rest of you, while there is no translation available, I think you get the general idea (At the end of the video, the attendant is telling the woman to turn off her cellphone since it is dangerous to operate one in a gas station).
10:50AM: Turkish hackers have apparently succeeded in hacking a number of Israeli websites, accessing e-mail addresses, passwords, and user accounts of 100,000 persons, and placing the stolen data online.
Turkish hackers have obtained the passwords and credit card details of 32,561 Israeli users, the Israeli We-CMS blog says.
According to the blog, a Turkish message board has uploaded a list containing credit card details, PayPal and bank usernames and passwords. The list is also said to contain more than 140 passwords to Israeli government websites and over 300 passwords for Israeli academic web pages.
Erez Wolf, owner of We-CMS, says most of the passwords were retrieved by a hacker into an Israeli commercial website whose name he did not reveal. On his twitter page, Wolf noted that a small number of the passwords was allegedly obtained from the Israeli articles.co.il website. The passwords and usernames were posted in an Excel document uploaded to the Turkish board by a surfer.
Wolf added that a debate is currently raging on the Turkish board regarding what should be done with the stolen data. Some surfers claimed that the accounts must not be used or compromised, as the ultimate goal was to target Israel on the political level.
Other surfers, however, argued that as enemies of Islam, any harm to Israeli users was permitted. Some users referred to social, criminal and religious arguments and some went as far as quoting Quran passages on the assets of heretics.
Wolf wrote that he approached the Turkish website for a response, which has not yet been received. The Excel file has been turned over to the Israel Police.
Any Israelis who want to know if their e-mail address is on the spreadsheet can go to this website, and enter their email address. The site checks whether or not the entered email address is on a frequently updated list.
9:05AM: The people of Gaza have had their freedom curtailed by Hamas yet again.
In its latest attempt to try to impose a conservative Islamic way of life on Gaza, Hamas started this weekend to enforce a ban on smoking water pipes in public.
A spokesman for the Hamas police, Ayman al-Batniji, said that the ban applied only to women and that it was in line with “the Palestinian people’s customs and traditions.”
But many cafe owners said they had been ordered to ban water pipes for both men and women.
Smoking large water pipes called shisha, usually with bowls of flavored tobacco, is a longstanding pastime here.
Plainclothes members of the Hamas security services have been inspecting cafes along the Gaza City beachfront, including men-only establishments like Al Shera Café, where men go to drink coffee, tea and soft drinks while playing cards.
Ahmed Yazji, manager of the Orient House Hotel in Gaza city, said the conflicting orders were confusing. Plainclothes policemen “come to check and still order us not to serve shisha to anybody,” he said, “though we hear the order has been amended to include only women.”
Cafe owners said the ban had been issued orally to dozens of cafes along the seafront on Thursday night.
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On Friday night, a bearded man in plainclothes with a pistol entered the Al Shera Café, and nodded his head in satisfaction that no shisha was being smoked.
The receptionist asked him how long the ban would stay in place.
“Until a different, new order is issued,” the man with the pistol replied.
Even at fancy restaurants like Roots and the Deira hotel, which cater to foreigners, shisha stalls and corners were shut down. Fewer than a quarter of the tables were occupied in both places on Friday night, an unusually low turnout for a summer weekend evening.
Alaa al-Kurd, who runs a makeshift cafeteria for three months every summer, said shisha smokers made up 70 percent of his customers.
He used to make 200 to 250 bowls of tobacco a day and sell them for seven shekels, or just under $2 each.
Now most of the people who come to the men’s section leave when they hear they cannot get a water pipe, he said.
He said he had paid thousands of dollars to rent the land for the cafeteria from the municipality, which is run by Hamas.
He said the municipality should have clarified that shisha would be banned before he had paid the rent.
Khalil Abu Shamala, director of Al Dameer Association for Human Rights, said that banning smoking for health reasons would be welcome, but the recent decision “seems to be serving Hamas’s own program.”
He noted that people sitting at the cafes on Friday night were still smoking cigarettes.
I am still waiting for Free Gaza, ISM and other so-called pro-palestinian groups to condemn this. But I won’t hold my breath (or smoke shisha) while I wait.
Meanwhile, the auto-translated Paltoday report on this latest insanity has produced some comical results.
That’s just the headline. The auto-translated report also contains this doozy:
The decision triggered outrage of citizens, especially pedophiles smoking waterpipes.
8:52AM: I wonder if any Muslims will condemn this desecration of the sanctity of a mosque.
6:08AM: Here’s a report dealing with the rampant starvation in Gaza, as well as palestinian elation at the “blockade” being eased.
