Monday, December 05, 2005

  • Monday, December 05, 2005
  • Elder of Ziyon
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Riza Asefi responded to recent Israeli comments that Iran's nuclear program was an unacceptable threat to its security, saying that 'Zionist authorities are well aware that if they make a foolish mistake against Iran, Iran's harsh response will be destructive and determined.'

But, hey, I'm sure that diplomacy will work wonders in defusing the crisis.
  • Monday, December 05, 2005
  • Elder of Ziyon
Jonathan D. Halevi (News First Class-Hebrew)
On the very day of a suicide bombing in Netanya, it has been reported that the chairman of the Palestinian Authority gave budgetary approval to assistance for the families of suicide bombers.

Each martyr's family will receive a monthly stipend of at least $250 from the PA.

The budget for families of martyrs, prisoners, and the wounded could reach $100 million a year out of an annual budget of over $1 billion.
Your tax dollars at work.
  • Monday, December 05, 2005
  • Elder of Ziyon
"I believe that this harms Palestinian interests and is another act to sabotage efforts to revive the peace process and to sabotage the Palestinian elections," Erekat said.

Once again, Palestinians say they "condemn" a murderous terror attack - but only in context of how it is counterproductive for their cause, not because it kills innocent people. (As if the most efficient way for Islamic Jihad to sabotage an Arab election is by killing Jews!)

In other words, if killing many innocent Jews would help the Palestinian Arab cause in any way, Erekat would be all for it.

Yesterday I posted how the director of the film "Paradise Now" strenuously tries to distinguish between suicide bombings in Israel and those in Bali, London, Madrid, Iraq, New York, Afghanistan and anywhere else in the world. He said, "Palestine is a different conflict. The Palestinians are being physically oppressed. We face 60 years of occupation. Maybe they use the same methods elsewhere, but to understand anything, you must understand the conflict, not just look to the action."

This is not a unique perspective. The fact that the film has gotten so many awards shows that much of the left, and much of Europe, also subscribes to the notion that Palestinian terror attacks are somehow more justified - and the inescapable conclusion is that they feel that when the victims are Jews, it is somehow more moral. The Palestinian Arab leaders themselves are often quick to condemn attacks such as 9/11 on moral grounds.

Which begs the question - according to the smug genteel Jew-hating intelligentsia of Europe, what could the Palestinians do that would be considered immoral? In other words, once blowing up shoppers in a mall can be justified because of "occupation," what cannot be?

Let's do a thought experiment. Let's say that a Palestinian terrorist decides to murder a baby girl, gut out her insides and replace it with explosives, sew her back up and throw the baby bomb in the middle of a Jewish kindergarten.

Or let's say that the Palestinian terror leadership decides that while bombing Jews is an effective method of terrorizing Jews, mass raping teenage Jewish girls and boys would also cause Jews to be scared and consider ceding land.

Once the "occupation" justifies terrorism, what does it not justify? There are no red lines anymore, as long as the "greater good" of Jews giving up land to Arabs is the potential result.

Or to put it another way, anyone who considers Palestinian suicide bombings at all justified in any way, shape or form is a completely and thoroughly immoral person, and any moral justifications that they find for their cause is the worst sort of hypocrisy.

And Saeb Erekat is one such person.
  • Monday, December 05, 2005
  • Elder of Ziyon
Let's see how much further in the sand El-Baradei can stick his head.
IAEA chairman Muhammad ElBaradei on Monday confirmed Israel's assessment that Iran is only a few months away from creating an atomic bomb.

If Teheran indeed resumed its uranium enrichment in other plants, as threatened, it will take it only 'a few months' to produce a nuclear bomb, El-Baradei told The Independent.

On the other hand, he warned, any attempt to resolve the crisis by non-diplomatic means would 'open a Pandora's box. There would be efforts to isolate Iran; Iran would retaliate; and at the end of the day you have to go back to the negotiating table to find the solution.'

And we all know that a diplomatic Pandora's box would be much worse than hundreds of thousands of dead Jews.

Much better to continue with the effective negotiations that the West has pursued with Iran over the years. There will be a breakthrough, any decade now.

Sunday, December 04, 2005

  • Sunday, December 04, 2005
  • Elder of Ziyon
I came across an amusing piece in Asharq Alawsat just now. The author is described this way:
Ghida Fakhry is New York Bureau Chief of Asharq Al Awsat and a weekly columnist for the newspaper. From 2002 to 2004, she was Anchor of Al-Hayat/LBC’s main evening news broadcast live from London. During the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, she reported on location from Kabul and Baghdad, and interviewed numerous senior US officials, including Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. During her journalistic career, she covered extensively the United Nations as New York Bureau Chief of Al Jazeera and for Abu Dhabi Television. She traveled on special assignments with Kofi Annan to the Middle East and conducted several in-depth interviews with the Secretary-General of the UN. She appears as a guest analyst on CNN, ABC News, NBC and MSNBC. Ghida Fakhry holds an M.A in Near and Middle Eastern Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and an M.A. in International Relations from Boston University.

One would think that with such credentials she would have at least a passing familiarity with Middle Eastern history.

One would be wrong.
The United Nations marked last Tuesday the "International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People" held every year on 29 November. Paradoxically, this is the day the General Assembly adopted in 1947 Resolution 181 on the "Future Government of Palestine" –a landmark if forgotten resolution that set forth the "Plan of Partition with Economic Union" that was to establish an "Arab State" in 43.5 percent of then British-occupied Palestine, a "Jewish State" in 56.5 percent of that territory, and an international enclave to include Jerusalem and its surroundings. In adopting the Partition Plan, the United Nations committed two sins. The first one, by paving the way towards the establishment of two States, the United Nations legislated a fundamentally artificial political segregation between "Arabs" and "Jews", as if an Arab could not belong to the Jewish faith and a Jew to the Arab world. It laid a barrier between communities that more often than not intersected, had more to unite than divide them. It was a conceptual distinction that pitted communities against each other that had coexisted peacefully for centuries and, aided by the migratory influx of European Jews into Palestine, fuelled hatred and deepened the sense of injustice. The second sin of the United Nations was to adopt a Plan and not ensure its implementation. To say the least, this is undoubtedly the international organization’s biggest blunder.
As the author well knows, there is no paradox to the date that the UN chose to annually condemn Israel and pretend to care about Palestinian Arabs. It was chosen on purpose.

As I have documented many times in the Palestine Postings blog, the life of Jews in Palestine was hardly peaceful (the 1929 massacres would seem to prove that), and to blame the UN for the Arabs' terroristic intransigence against allowing Jews to control any land in the entire Middle East is pretty funny. The separation between Jews and Arabs were wholly the fault of the Arabs who just couldn't stomach Jews in power.

But the funniest part of this poorly-written paragraph is that she is blaming the UN for not making sure that Resolution 181 was not implemented! The Jews accepted 181 wholeheartedly, it was the Arabs who rejected it unanimously - and tried to destroy the Jewish state that resulted.

There is no doubt in my mind that Ms. Fakhry knows these facts as well as anyone.

So the only conclusion that can be drawn is that this esteemed Arab journalist and scholar is simply a liar.

Which begs the question - why do CNN, ABC and NBC use easily provable liars as analysts?
  • Sunday, December 04, 2005
  • Elder of Ziyon
Q: What did the 'Yekke' say to his wife before going to shul to daven on the night of December 4th?
A: "I'm going to be home a little late tonight, honey. "

(Indirect hat tip to JudeoPundit.)
  • Sunday, December 04, 2005
  • Elder of Ziyon
AbbaGav points out some Reuters' photography bias.

An Israeli soldier (L) inspects a Palestinian man at a checkpoint in the West Bank city of Hebron on December 4, 2005. REUTERS/Nayef Hashlamoun
He notes:
You might think I'm just an oppressing Zionist with no empathy or sympathy. But believe me, I think I -- and indeed most Israelis -- can understand a little bit of the Palestinian's position, and then some. We go through the same checks countless times in our daily lives as well, just to get into the supermarket, the library, the swimming pool or our kids' schools. Nor do our spouses and kids just stand by watching the checks, they get checked too. And once we pass the security check we don't breathe a sigh of relief and hope the next guy gets off easier. No, we pray the security guard is as inconveniently intrusive with everyone else who follows, if not more so.
  • Sunday, December 04, 2005
  • Elder of Ziyon
I am really thankful that SoccerDad likes my blog, because whenever he hosts Haveil Havalim he always mentions me!

This time, as with #45, I am mentioned twice - for this news roundup from last Friday (which I considered pretty much a throwaway post myself) and for this post where the BBC blames Israel for the internal problems that the Palestinian "security forces" are having. (My "Palestinian Police Phunnies" series is a small sample of documentation that the Palestinian police problems are a little deeper than how the august BBC describes them.)

As I always say whenever I'm mentioned, it is an excellent roundup of the best of this week's JBlogosphere. (Although in the section entitled "Palestinian Democracy" I am at a loss as to why he didn't use scare quotes around the word "democracy.")
  • Sunday, December 04, 2005
  • Elder of Ziyon
As the world heaps praise on the film "Paradise Now" as an even-handed and honest look at Palestinian terrorists as being just ordinary human beings who are pushed into blowing up Jews because they are forced to by Israel, it is interesting to read the articles where the reviewers are bending over backwards to say that the director, Abu Assad, is not making any judgments on the subject.

But as this article in the Toronto Globe and Mail shows, the director is hardly unbiased (and, frankly, his grasp of the politics is puerile.) A reporter destroyed everything the director claimed about the conflict, leaving only the idea that he just hates Israel's very existence:
By MICHAEL POSNER

I had intended to question director Hany Abu-Assad about his film Paradise Now, the story of two Palestinians, auto mechanics from the West Bank, who decide to become suicide bombers. It didn't work out that way.

When we met during the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, I began by telling Abu-Assad -- a tall, elegant, 43-year-old Palestinian who spends much of his time these days in Amsterdam -- that I considered the film provocative.

"Why provocative?" he asked.

Because it attempts to explain, and thus implicitly justify, the taking of innocent lives, I replied. And because suicide bombing is no longer a tactic that occurs only in Israel or even Iraq. In the current geopolitical climate, it could happen anywhere.

Abu-Assad disagreed. "Palestine is a different conflict," he insisted. "The Palestinians are being physically oppressed. We face 60 years of occupation. Maybe they use the same methods elsewhere, but to understand anything, you must understand the conflict, not just look to the action."

According to Abu-Assad, the despair that turns ordinary car mechanics and teenage girls into suicide bombers is the result of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank (and until recently, the Gaza Strip).

But there was Palestinian militancy, even terrorism, long before the Six-Day War in 1967. Moreover, I countered, suicide bombing is not something generally organized by moderate Palestinians committed to finding a peaceful modus vivendi with Israel. It's the work of Hamas, which regards not just the West Bank, but all of Israel as occupied territory. In the film, the two bombers are trained and monitored by just such a shadowy, unnamed group. So where do you stand, I asked him.

Abu-Assad deflected the question. "It's not about where is Palestine and where is Israel. It's about denying the rights of Palestinians in their land. It's about the principle that both have to have equal rights, as individuals and as a nation. Hamas is no different than most of Israel. Most of Israel thinks it's all Jewish land. Hamas wants an Islamic state and Israel wants a Jewish state. So the same, yes?"

Well, no, actually. First of all, the vast majority of Israelis have renounced any claim to so-called Greater Israel. Indeed, the man who was once the chief proponent of that idea, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, has become the grand architect of disengagement, handing back the Gaza Strip and a handful of West Bank settlements this summer.

"They have just made Gaza a bigger jail," Abu-Assad maintained.

But the logic of that argument leads to the Hamas position. Whatever land Israel returns, it will always be simply "a bigger jail" until the Zionist cause is finally abandoned.

Look, he said, "the issue is equal rights. Unless they are equals, you will have conflict. There is no other solution." But true peace, Abu-Assad added, can only be achieved if Israel severs its ties with the United States. "How can you survive in a place where you are protecting the interests of someone else?" he asked.

But why would Israel do that, "surrounded by 22 Arab nations, many of which are committed to its dissolution?"

Very simply, Abu-Assad said, "To survive. To be part of the Middle East." Besides, he added, "Washington's interests will diminish when the oil is gone, and what will Israel do then?"
Moronic nonsense, in black and white. He doesn't even try to maintain a consistent position, except that he hates the Jewish state - everything else is a smokescreen to make him sound more reasonable that gets shredded at the slightest questioning.

Which, come to think of it, is pretty much the Arab and leftist position regarding Israel to begin with.

Thursday, December 01, 2005

  • Thursday, December 01, 2005
  • Elder of Ziyon
Once again, the oh-so-impartial BBC ignores the endemic corruption and terror that is part and parcel of the Palestinian Arab "security forces" and blames Israel for all their problems.

Any problems that are internal are described in the passive voice that we are all familiar with; but Israel's supposed role is highlighted - as if the Palestinian police would otherwise be Scotland Yard.

Also implicit is the BBC's acceptance that the role of the Pal Police Phonies is only to stop internal crime; not a word about stopping terror against Israel. That way, when Israel defends itself it is just another attack against the upstanding police - trained by the EU.

Note as well the unsubstantiated "fact" that an Israeli missile dug out a massive crater in the picture. Perhaps it did, perhaps it was a Hamas rocket gone awry, perhaps it was an attack against a known terrorist - but the BBC will never say where their "facts" come from.
With the departure of Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip this summer, attention is focusing on the ability of the Palestinians to assert control in an area of increasing lawlessness.

It is a challenge beset by problems: the infrastructure of the Palestinian security forces has been decimated by Israeli attacks and the territory is awash with illicit weapons and armed groups.

The multitude of security forces themselves are in poor shape - badly-equipped with ill-defined roles, competing branches and an unreformed hierarchical structure set up under the autocratic rule of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

But after a period of stagnation and disarray, the international community has begun a drive to transform the largest of the security services, the civilian police, into a modern force capable of enforcing the rule of law and stamping out growing chaos.

At the centre of this move is the European Union, which recently announced a new three-year mission to reform and rebuild the police force in the West Bank and Gaza.

"The civil police is the cornerstone of all the Palestinian security forces," Jonathan McIvor, the head of the EU Co-ordinating Office for Palestinian Police Support, known as EU-Copps, told the BBC News website.

"It is a cornerstone of democracy, it's the most important of all the Palestinian security forces in terms of building a Palestinian state, not to mention the most 'together'."

Police cars and crater
A fleet of new police cars sit near a crater carved by an Israeli missile

Kaj Stendorf, chief superintendent of the Danish national police, is among the advisers training the Palestinian police.

In a parade ground outside his office in the Palestinian police headquarters in Gaza City stands a fleet of gleaming blue patrol cars, part of a 1,000-strong consignment delivered by the European mission.

Beside them lies a deep crater gouged out by an Israeli missile - a reminder of the damage from which the police have yet to recover after years of conflict.

Within its first few months, the mission - with the help of Denmark, the UK and Norway - restored the radio communication system to 60% of the Palestinian police force, after it had been decimated by Israeli attacks.

Bomb squad

One of the EU-Copps' most important functions has been to modernise and train the Palestinian police's bomb squad, or Explosive and Ordnance Disposal Unit (EODU).

The Gaza Strip is littered with deadly devices, from mines left behind by the Israeli army to explosives planted by militants and even shells dating back to WW1.

Palestinian children are often among the casualties caused by discarded explosives, prompting the UN children's charity Unicef to launch an awareness campaign....

By the end of its three-year term, Kaj says, the EU-Copps mission should benefit both sides.

"We aim to turn the Palestinian police into a modern, well-organised, well-structured, well-policed security service.

"It will provide safety not only for Palestinians, but by default Israel too."

How exactly arming known terrorists and giving them new cars and materials will help Israel is something that the BBC will have to explain a little better one day.
  • Thursday, December 01, 2005
  • Elder of Ziyon
Isn't it wonderful that the leaders of world terror movements have embraced democracy so enthusiastically?
Hamas Leader Says He Won't Renew Truce: "'The resistance must go hand in hand with political work,' he said. 'It is not accepted to pressure the resistance to choose between resistance and politics.'

Asked if Hamas would accept a peace accord creating an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, Mashaal said the group 'will never abandon any Palestinian right and will not recognize the legitimacy of occupation whatsoever.'"


The Muslim Brotherhood, spiritual forebearers of Hamas, Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda, also embraces democracy - much to the approval of Madeline Albright.

The president must be thrilled - democracy is spreading quickly throughout the Islamic world!

There's only the minor detail of what these new enthusiasts of democracy plan to do with their political clout.
Towards a worldwide strategy for Islamic policy
(Points of Departure, Elements, Procedures and Missions)

This report presents a global vision of a worldwide strategy for Islamic policy [or "political Islam"]. Local Islamic policies will be drawn up in the different regions in accordance with its guidelines. It acts, first of all, to define the points of departure of that policy, then to set up the components and the most important procedures linked to each point of departure; finally we suggest several missions, by way of example only, may Allah protect us.

The following are the principal points of departure of this policy:

Point of Departure 1: To know the terrain and adopt a scientific methodology for its planning and execution.

Point of Departure 2: To demonstrate proof of the serious nature of the work.

Point of Departure 3: To reconcile international engagement with flexibility at a local level.

Point of Departure 4: To reconcile political engagement and the necessity of avoiding isolation on one hand, with permanent education and institutional action on the other.

Point of Departure 5: To be used to establish an Islamic State; parallel, progressive efforts targeted at controlling the local centres of power through institutional action.

Point of Departure 6: To work with loyalty alongside Islamic groups and institutions in multiple areas to agree on common ground, in order to "cooperate on the points of agreement and set aside the points of disagreement".

Point of Departure 7: To accept the principle of temporary cooperation between Islamic movements and nationalist movements in the broad sphere and on common ground such as the struggle against colonialism, preaching and the Jewish state, without however having to form alliances. This will require, on the other hand, limited contacts between certain leaders, on a case by case basis, as long as these contacts do not violate the [shariah?] law. Nevertheless, one must not give them allegiance or take them into confidence, bearing in mind that the Islamic movement must be the origin of the initiatives and orientations taken.

Point of Departure 8: To master the art of the possible on a temporary basis without abusing the basic principles, bearing in mind that Allah's teachings always apply. One must order the suitable and forbid that which is not, always providing a documented opinion [? "Il faut ordonner le convenable et interdire le blâmable, tout en donnant un avis documenté"]. But we should not look for confrontation with our adversaries, at the local or the global scale, which would be disproportionate and could lead to attacks against the dawa or its disciples.

Point of Departure 9: To construct a permanent force of the Islamic dawa and support movements engaged in jihad across the Muslim world, to varying degrees and insofar as possible.

Point of Departure 10: To use diverse and varied surveillance systems, in several places, to gather information and adopt a single effective warning system serving the worldwide Islamic movement. In fact, surveillance, policy decisions and effective communications complement each other.

Point of Departure 11: To adopt the Palestinian cause as part of a worldwide Islamic plan, with the policy plan and by means of jihad, since it acts as the keystone of the renaissance of the Arab world today.

Point of Departure 12: To know how to turn to self-criticism and permanent evaluation of worldwide Islamic policy and its objectives, of its content and its procedures, in order to improve it. This is a duty and a necessity according to the precepts of sharia.


Clearly, the goal is an Islamic state that is not going to be democratic. Using political means and temporary alliances to move closer to the goal of a worldwide 'ummah is acceptable, but ultimately such a state would be governed by Sharia law, and non-Muslims will either be banned (infidels) or have to pay their toll tax and accept second-class status (dhimmis.)

Unfortunately, the self-righteous hypocritical Islamist whining about "democracy" is very effective for wishful-thinking bleeding heart idiots like Albright.

Democracy without freedom is worthless.

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This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For over 19 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.

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