Porno, Bombs, Internet and Belly Dance

How to live under the new Hamas directives..

“Belly-dancing is naked women. This is not Islamic,” says the new Palestinian culture minister, Attallah Abu al-Sibbah, an Islamic scholar who has joined the Hamas government which was installed last week, (2006). ” …

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….”But there’s no doubt that Hamas wants to impose its narrow vision of moral purity on the Palestinians, who until recently enjoyed one of the most secular cultures in the Middle East. The ban on belly- dancing reveals Hamas’s intense suspicion, which it shares with all Islamist organisations, of pleasure and female sexuality’ it’s no accident, after all, that belly-dancing has been taken up with such gusto by feminists, myself included, who love its celebration of the natural female body.”.

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This was written on April 7, 2006.”… See here for the full article “Hamas, and the sexual power of real women”

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Today (2008), Under the excuse of the porno ban (see here ), remebering the above statement about belly dancing, Hamas is continuing monitoring  the internet in the Gaza Strip,  hearing seeing and reading any flow of news into his Internet jurisdiction area.

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 I quote from Menassat:

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..”Palestinian journalists in the Strip are up in arms about the whole affair as the filtering has slowed and even halted Internet traffic entirely during busy news days.

 ‘What Hamas wants from monitoring the Internet is  to control its impact on public opinion,’ Alyan said.”….

  The director of Reuters’ Gaza office, Nidal Al Mughrabi, told MENASSAT, ‘The decision has had a huge impact on our work, since we are an international agency known for our up-to-date news coverage, and we are in competition with other international agencies.’ “.. 

 

…”Saleh Al Masri, a journalist and editor at the Palestine Today website, told MENASSAT, “We are not against regulating the Internet, but we were highly affected in terms of download speed. Our readership too dropped by more than half.” …

 

Gaza-based writer Abdullah Alyan said, ‘Pornography is only an excuse for the filtering, the other reasons are monitoring people’s use of the Internet, especially news sites and forums, to curtail the widespread online campaign against the Hamas’ government and the behavior of its members in Gaza.’ “see here.

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Hamas’s monitoring Gaza’s strip Internet does not affect other to monitoring the Hamas sites.

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Two websites operated by Hezbollah and Hamas were being hosted by a Canadian internet service provider even though the militant groups are barred from operating in the country, CBC News has learned.

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Halevi wrote a letter of complaint to iWeb, the Montreal internet company that owns computer servers that play host to the websites.The company replied the websites were inoffensive and just “an informational portal such as CBC.ca.”Halevi said he was shocked by the response.”That was amazing because there is a big difference between CBC and the Hamas, al-Aqsa TV website. The messages are totally different.”

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CBC News translated some of the Arabic section of the Hamas website, a discussion forum.One post included a list of instructions on how to conceal a bomb in a crowded market. Another posting explained how to make a roadside bomb look like a rock.The site is also full of anti-Israeli rhetoric, and pages that glorify those who died in suicide attacks as martyrs, see here.

So  Hamas is banning any ‘import’ of so called porn and belly dancing but is exporting bomb making and shahid education for future explosing martyrs.

And a last remark by Palestinian culture minister Attallah Abu al-Sibbah (2006) wich may be actual today…”The Egyptians come here and do it [belly dancing]. And there are a lot of Russian belly dancers in Egypt and they come here too. People do it indoors, in secret. There’s lots of it. If the phenomenon of belly dancing spreads our people might react against it by killing people. We don’t want our people to become like the Taliban.”..see here.

A surprising belly dancer is Haifa Whebe .

haifa wehbe and ragheb alama

Haifa Wehbe Belly Dances for Ragheb Alama  see here.

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