Two on Dubai and Isreali investment: Sabbah's blog

Is Dubai helping ethnic cleansing in Palestine?

Author: Khalid Amayreh

The government of Dubai recently allowed a major bankroller of Jewish settlement expansion in the West Bank to open at least two Jewelry stores in the Gulf emirate.

According to reliable sources in the United Arab Emirates, of which Dubai is a key member-state, Israeli billionaire and diamond magnate Lev Leviev is preparing to open two large jewelry stores in Dubai, a world’s hub of Jewelry trading.

The first store will be opened soon at the Burj Dubai Mall (Dubai Mall Tower) while a second store is slated to be opened later this year in the new Atlantis Hotel on the Jumeirah Palm Island.
Leviev has already opened one store in Dubai in March, 2008, in the lobby of al-Qasr Hotel on Madinat Jumeirah.
The Dubai authorities were initially reluctant to grant the Israeli billionaire a license to do business in the oil-rich emirate. However, Leviev reportedly successfully lobbied “North American and European connections” to convince Dubai officials to reconsider their objections.

Leviev’s companies, including Africa-Israel and Leader Management & Development as well as several other subsidiaries, have been quite active in displacing Palestinian villagers from their homes and land in several parts of the West Bank.

The two firms have built hundreds of settler units in at least five Jewish settlements constructed on land illegally seized from its Arab proprietors.

In recent years, a company called Leader belonging to Leviev built the settlement of Zufim on private Arab land seized from the village of Jayyous. Danya Cebus, a subsidiary of the Leviev-owned company Africa-Israel has built hundreds of settler units on land stolen from the village of Bilin. Numerous additional settler units were built in the two large settlements of Ma’ali Adomim, a few kilometers east of Jerusalem, and Har Homa, near the predominantly Christian Arab town of Beit Sahur.

Israel hopes that these settlements will cut off East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, thus making the Palestinian dream of making the city the future capital of a prospective Palestinian state utterly unrealistic and outright impossible.

In addition to his intensive involvement in Jewish settlement expansion, including colonies defined by the inherently unjust Israeli justice system as “manifestly illegal,” Leviev has donated undisclosed but reportedly large sums of money to the Land Redemption Fund, a land-grabbing organization affiliated with Gush Emunim, the ideological group behind Jewish settlement activities in the West Bank.
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Call on Dubai to boycott Leviev’s stores over Israel settlements

Author: Haitham

New York human rights activists, and representatives of the West Bank Palestinian villages of Bil’in and Jayyous called on the government and the people of the United Arab Emirates to boycott the jewelry stores of Israeli billionaire and diamond magnate Lev Leviev over his companies’ construction of Israeli settlements. According to a flurry of recent media reports, Leviev is opening jewelry stores in Dubai during 2008.

“We call on the government and people of the United Arab Emirates to join the growing international campaign to boycott Lev Leviev’s companies due to their construction of Israeli colonial settlements, and their human rights violations in Angola,”

declared Daniel Lang-Levitsky of Jews Against the Occupation-NYC. “A major Israeli violator of Palestinian rights and international law should not be opening jewelry stores in Dubai,” added Adalah-NY spokesperson Issa Ayoub. Adalah-NY has organized eight boycott protests outside Leviev’s new Madison Avenue jewelry store over the last five months.

In the last few days, media have reported that Lev Leviev Diamonds will open two stores in Dubai this year. In the fourth quarter of 2008, construction will begin on a store to be located in the Burj Dubai Mall. The second will open in September in the new Atlantis Hotel on Jumeirah Palm Island. Leviev has already opened one store in Dubai in March, 2008 in the lobby of Al-Qasr Hotel on Madinat Jumeirah.

Leviev’s company Leader is building the settlement of Zufim on the land of the West Bank village of Jayyous. The company Danya Cebus, a subsidiary of Leviev’s Africa-Israel, has also built Israeli settlements on the land of the village of Bil’in, and has built homes in Maale Adumim and Har Homa on Jabal Abu Ghneim, encircling and cutting off East Jerusalem from the West Bank. Israel is building its wall to the east of all these settlements, with the aim of annexing them to Israel. Leviev also donates to the Land Redemption Fund, an Israeli settler organization which has used deceit and strong-arm tactics to secure Israeli-occupied Palestinian land for settlements in villages like Bil’in and Jayyous.
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Here's a question on the internet cable damage ..

This outtage does not appear to effect the UAE . DUBAI. Strategically important Dubai is.

Now .. just what if - the entire point of this exercise is to see strategically how people find ways to work around a damaged internet, living Dubai as a hub to process the information?

Someone was on here yesterday from Japan trying to figure out low cost ways to access Azerbejain .. yup, seriously. The business of business must go on!!

Veeger

UAE unaffected by fourth internet cable break

by Dylan Bowman on Monday, 04 February 2008

UAE telecoms Etisalat and Du said on Monday they have not been affected by the second undersea cable damaged off the UAE coast that caused massive disruption to internet services in Qatar over the weekend.

Qatar Telecom (Qtel) said on Sunday a cable was damaged between the Qatari island of Haloul and the UAE island of Das on Friday, the fourth reported in the Middle East in less than a week.

RELATED: Internet problems continue with fourth cable break

The damage caused major problems for internet users in the Gulf Arab state, but Qtel's loss of capacity has been kept below 40% thanks to what the telecom said was a large number of alternative routes for transmission.

"Etisalat is not affected by the most recent cut," a spokesperson told ArabianBusiness.com.

"We has not been affected by this at all," a Du spokesperson added.

The cause of damage is not yet known, but ArabianBusiness.com has been told unofficially the problem is power related and not the result of a ship's anchor cutting the cable, as is thought to be the case in the other three incidents.

It is expected to take at least "a few days" to fix, according to one person with knowledge of the situation.

It had been feared the damaged cable would further disrupt UAE internet services.

Parts of the Gulf Arab region were plunged into a virtual internet blackout on Wednesday when two undersea cables were cut near Alexandria, on Egypt’s north coast.

The initial breaches were in segments of two intercontinental cables known as Sea-ME-We-4 and Flag Europe-Asia.

The situation was made worse on Friday when Flag, part of India's Reliance Communications, revealed a third cable, Falcon, had also been damaged off the UAE coast.

Etisalat said it does not use the Falcon cable and is therefore unaffected, but Du had warned the damage could hamper its efforts to restore normal service to customers.

Du said on Monday that its internet and telephone services were now largely back to normal.

"Our internet access is almost back to normal... and data services are 100% restored," Mahesh Jaishankar, executive director for business development and marketing, told reporters.

Qatar reports new damage to Gulf undersea cables

1 day ago

DOHA (AFP) — An undersea telecoms cable linking Qatar to the United Arab Emirates was damaged, disrupting services, telecommunications provider Qtel said on Sunday, the latest such incident in less than a week.

The cable was damaged between the Qatari island of Haloul and the UAE island of Das on Friday, Qtel's head of communications Adel al Mutawa told AFP.

Cables were also damaged last week in the Mediterranean and off the coast of Dubai, causing widespread disruption to Internet and international telephone services in Egypt, Gulf Arab states and south Asia.

The cause of the damage is not yet known.

Mutawa said Qtel's loss of capacity had been kept below 40 percent over the weekend thanks to what he said was Qatar's large number of alternative routes for transmission.

The UAE telecommunications watchdog said disruption to Internet and telephone services in the Gulf state was likely to continue for 10 another days.

UAE telecoms provider "du" said in an statement on its website that the owners of the Mediterranean cables, FLAG Telecom and SEA-ME-WE4, were fixing the damage.

"While no schedule is available yet for the repair, initial estimates indicate it will take two weeks to repair the FLAG cable," the statement said.

"du has already started transfering Internet and international voice traffic through other cable systems that have not been affected, although some congestion may be expected at peak times until the issue is resolved."

The UAE's other telecoms provider, Etisalat, and Saudi Arabia's STC said they had not been affected.

Egypt's ministry of communications said on Saturday that Internet disruption would last another 10 days.

A repair ship was expected to begin work to fix the two cables in the Mediterranean Sea on Tuesday. They were damaged on Wednesday, rupturing connections not only in Egypt but also thousands of kilometres away.

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Middle East Reaction to the BuZh visit

The US Pres and most of what I see on US blogsites, is STILL preoccupied with the standoff (hahaha) between a handful of Iran speedboats and the US fleet in the Gulf or perplexed by the lack of enthusiasm for Bush's status in the Middle East. A few of the sites are talking about the $80-billion purchase of arms by the Saudis.

So I went hunting to see how the Middle East itself responded to Bush and all the hoopla.

IN SHORT: The US is being increasingly (is that possible?) isolated with Israel as the world's two worst human rights violators and everyone is "hip" to the fact Bush is about to leave office. No self respecting arab nation has any desire to dig Bush or Cheney out from the hole they've dug for themselves. I think I would have to dig real deep to find a single arabic paper (or politician for that matter) who took Bush's visit seriously.

The IAEA honcho El Baradei has been cozying it up with the Ayatollah Khomeini. Al Baradei, in fact, gave an unprecedented interview to Al-Hayat newspaper owned by the Saudis. Iran's papers have very little to say. The Kuwaiti Foreign Minister is headed for meetings in Tehran. The Saudi Foreign Minister was unprecendently blunt with the United States. There even "rumors" that a top level Iranian is inside Baghdad's Green Zone.

And so it goes.

While much of the Middle East still suffers under US or Israeli occupation, people are a bit afraid that George Bush, never one to predict, just might get ever more desperate as he tries to build a coalition against Iran .. and as that is failing, then what might he do? Desperate men resort to desperate measures is the most recent recited adage these days for anyone looking cooly and calmly at the outgoing American President and his ring of thugs.

I've posted below an editorial written in the form of an open letter to President George W. Bush, published above the fold of Dubai's GULF NEWS. It appeared shortly before Mr. Bush's arrival in the UAE.

The GULF NEWS is a moderate, mainstream newspaper in the UAE, considered to be a "moderate Arab state.

I think one could safely assume that this represent the commonly-held views of moderate, mainstream people in this (relatively pro-American) part of the Arab world.

Perhaps just a few of America's leaders running for President should a good, thorough read of this article, too. Maybe Mr. McCain will reconsider stationing Americans in Iraq for the next 100-years and just maybe even Mr. Obama will rethink the "option" he thinks he can use if warranted in Pakistan. Maybe Ms. Clinton just might rethink voting for more war funding.

Well, just maybe.

Gulf News

Editorial

Letter to George W. Bush

Gulf News

Published: January 11, 2008

http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/08/01/11/10180995.html

Dear Mr. President;

On the occasion of your first official trip to this vital region, it is only appropriate to raise a few points which might also be raised by the leaders you meet. Unfortunately, you landed here with prejudice and pre-formed opinions. By describing Israel, moments after you arrived, as "the land of freedom" and "justice", you have shown total ignorance of the political situation in the Middle East and the issue you claim to want to solve in the remaining 12 months of your presidency. Israel, Mr. President, continues to defy every UN resolution, exercise unprecedented oppression on the occupied Palestinian people and persecute its Muslim and Christian population. We realise that containing Iran, selling more weapons and securing cheap oil supplies are the main issues on your mind as you tour the region. But you need to look beyond the neocon rhetoric and speak directly to the people who have been unjustly thrown out of their land, victimised by your "strong ally" Israel. As for other matters, such as the promise of democracy and human rights, which you are expected to raise in your official talks in the region, we really don't take them seriously. Your dreadful record on both gives you no moral right to lecture others.

Lest you forget. Invasion of Iraq. Thousands of dead. Looting the National Museum. Disbanding the Iraqi army. Donald Rumsfeld. Shock and Awe. Jay Garner. Paul Bremer. Inciting sectarianism. Abu Ghraib. Thousands of detainees without charges. Torture. Oil. Ghost WMDs. The Niger connection. Halliburton. Blackwater. Deadly security contractors. Mercenaries. Fallujah. Haditha massacre. Blind support of Israel. Instigating the suffering of Gaza. Ignoring the expansion of illegal colonies. Defying United Nations resolutions. Securing "a Jewish State". Allowing Israelis to extend the destruction of Lebanon in the 2oo6 war. Providing Israel with new Bunker Buster bombs to attack Lebanese towns. The War on Terror. "The Crusade". Clash of civilisations. Where is Osama Bin Laden? Afghanistan. Bagram massacre. Bombing media offices. Guantanamo Bay. Kangaroo courts. Indefinite detention. Presidential orders to ignore Geneva Conventions. "Unlawful enemy combatants". Illegal National Security Agency wiretapping. Fingerprinting visitors. Black prisons. Kidnapping foreign citizens on foreign lands. Khalid Al Masri. Abu Omar. Maher Arar. Central Intelligence Agency. "Aggressive interrogation techniques". Destroying the torture tapes. Iran tension. Isolating Syria. Embracing Syrian opposition Iraq style. The Chavez coup. Denial of global warming. Rejecting Kyoto Protocol. Marginalisation of the United Nations. John Bolton. Paul Wolfowitz and the World Bank. Carl Rove. Alberto Gonzales. Firing attorneys. Nepotism. False democracy promises. Dick Cheney, Dick Cheney and Dick Cheney.

Mr President,

The list goes on. You might not be able to recall some of it. But the people around you, Cheney and Condoleezza Rice especially, would. And they realise that on the subject of human rights, your administration has had the worst record of all, surpassing most Third World countries. The tension and the misery in parts of this region can very well testify to this.

Mr President,

In a famous speech in 2003 you announced an "historic" shift in US foreign policy. You pledged to support democracy and liberty while declaring "victory" in Iraq. More than four years later, Iraq is in chaos. It has virtually disintegrated and "the surge" did little to stop the killing or ease the sectarian tension. At the same time, you gave up on your freedom-for-all prophecy. We are all back to the old ways of doing business - arms and oil. The agenda of your current tour is evident.

Mr President,

This is your first official trip to a land you long claimed has a very special place in your heart. The land of the Prophets. However, you started out wrong. By maintaining your support of an Israeli "Jewish State", you are flouting your own ideals upon which your great country was founded more than two centuries ago. So much for the promise of democracy. What you advocate in fact is the creation of states on religious and racial lines, thereby justifying the atrocious actions of terrorists who hate and seek to eliminate the followers of other religions: The same terrorists you like to blame for every ill on earth and every failure of yours.

Mr President,

It has been reported that you are here to "lecture" us on democracy and human rights. But with a record like yours, you will not be very convincing. The people you are addressing have greater respect for human rights and dignity.

You also said that your current tour aims to realise the long neglected peace in the Middle East. Regional peace, Mr President, will not be achieved by escalating tension and threatening to change regimes. And most importantly, it will not be achieved by supporting Israel, which continues to defy international law, occupy Arab lands, oppress the Palestinians and rebuff peace initiatives.

Mr President,

We hope you have enjoyed the trip so far. The scenery is great. The food is exotic. As for the more "serious" things, it is unlikely you will make any difference.