Manama, 9 December – Badriya Ahmad, head of the Bahrain Society to Resist Normalization with the Zionist Enemy, informed that a special committee has been set up to help lift the embargo on the Gaza Strip and to support the Palestinian people. Addressing an audience of several organizations representing political, human rights and women's rights' initiatives, she declared that “We have decided that enough is enough and we agreed to form the committee because the situation in Gaza has reached catastrophic and atrocious proportions. Therefore, we need a clear political stance enabling us to take the necessary measures to lift the murderous cordon around the poor Palestinian victims”. The joint committee released a declaration calling on the governments of Arab countries to revoke all and any commitments to international agreements regarding their position towards the Israeli government on the grounds that Israel itself is the one who is ignoring all international laws and human rights conventions.

The joint Bahraini committee also joined in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's criticism of the handshake between Mohammad Sayed Tantawi, the most senior institutional religious authority in Egypt, and the Israeli President Shimon Peres at the recent interfaith conference in New York. The Bahraini committee commented the gesture saying that “the handshake with the Butcher of Qana [Peres] is a humiliation of Al Azhar, all Egyptians, Arabs and Muslims, and should be condemned". Meanwhile, in Egypt a committee in the Nile Delta has been formed to force the government to cancel an annual Jewish festival celebrating the birthday of a nineteenth-century Moroccan Jewish figure Abu Hasira.

Since 1979, following the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, every year to the end of December thousands of Israelis flock to the Nile Delta village of Demito, some 120 km north of Cairo, to attend the festival. The Egyptian parliamentarian Zakaria al-Janayni, one of the campaigners against the festival, summed up the local residents' complaints saying that “farmers are under pressure from [local] brokers to sell their land in the vicinity of the Abu Hasira tomb for Jewish investors who wish to set up hotels there. Those brokers offer very high prices, but their offers have so far been turned down". In 2004 an Egyptian court ruled against holding the festival and revoked a decision by the Ministry of Culture that listed the Abu Hasira tomb in the Delta village of Demita as an area hosting antiquities worthy of protection, but the Egyptian government has yet to comply with the ruling.

Source: http://www.arabmonitor.info