Sunday, February 07, 2010

  • Sunday, February 07, 2010
  • Elder of Ziyon
A new Pew Research poll shows that Palestinian Arabs identify more with Osama Bin Laden than any other polled group, save for Nigerian Muslims.

While only 28% of Jordanians and 23% of Egyptians (and only 2% of Lebanese) declared their confidence in Bin Laden, 51% of Palestinian Arabs showed confidence in him.

PalArabs also showed greater confidence in Hassan Nasrallah than any other polled group (65%), more confidence in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than any other group (45%) and more in Mahmoud Abbas (52%.)
Their answers show them to be much more extremist in their views than any Arab country polled.

The pragmatism that ordinary Palestinian Arabs had shown seems to be disappearing at an alarming rate, and one can guess that the incitement that they see on their own TV shows and other media is a large part of the problem.
  • Sunday, February 07, 2010
  • Elder of Ziyon
Too funny:

Remember, to see the scientific study yourself, write to

The Atomic Test Booklet,
Dorothy Gray Limited
Box 18
Grand Central Station
New York
  • Sunday, February 07, 2010
  • Elder of Ziyon
In Human Rights Watch's latest press release, the organization claims that Israel is not conducting "thorough and impartial investigations" concerning Operation Cast Lead.

While the military is conducting ongoing investigations, officials did not provide information showing that these will be thorough and impartial or that they will address the broader policy and command decisions that led to unlawful civilian deaths, Human Rights Watch said.

"Israel claims it is conducting credible and impartial investigations, but it has so far failed to make that case," said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director for Human Rights Watch. "An independent investigation is crucial to understand why so many civilians died and to bring justice for the victims of unlawful attacks."

...

The Israeli military has thus far examined specific incidents but not broader policies that may have caused civilian casualties in violation of the laws of war, Human Rights Watch said.

"The Israeli investigations so far have looked mostly at soldiers who disobeyed orders or the rules of engagement, but failed to ask the crucial question about whether those orders and rules of engagement themselves violated the laws of war," Stork said. "For those decisions and policies, senior military and political decision-makers should be held responsible."

HRW is being disingenuous again.

Apparently, no one from HRW read the original Cast Lead investigation report. In that report there were exhaustive descriptions of how IDF actions were entirely consistent with international law. HRW never responded to that report; it never answered its arguments; and as far as I know it never even referred to it.

This is not surprising. HRW bases much of its criticism of Israel (and other countries) on a bizarre, restricted interpretation of international law. With incredible hubris, HRW assumes from the outset that its interpretations are sacrosanct and inherently correct. Yet when Israel comes out with its own interpretation, that is consistent with the Geneva Conventions and other accepted sources of customary international law, HRW doesn't bother to answer with legal arguments: instead, it ignores them and insists that their own interpretations are the ones that the world must adhere to.

HRW is engaged in a massive misdirection, a sleight-of-hand so that it will not have to defend its own mistakes in the law. And it needs to do this for its very existence, because if HRW's version of international law is shown to be incorrect, every single report it has issued on that basis would need to be re-evaluated. So instead, HRW goes on the offensive and fails to address any substantive criticism. (As we have seen, HRW does not have the ability to investigate itself with any degree of objectivity, and it reacts to criticism in ways that can only be described as childish.)

Meanwhile, Israel's ongoing investigations are ongoing and taking literally thousands of man-hours. An IDF source described it to me this way:
These investigations are exhaustive and a logistical nightmare. The investigators talk to everyone involved, from the soldiers, to the commanders in the field, all the way up the chain of command. And almost all of the incidents can involve different branches of the army which require debriefings at every level (i.e. air force, tank unit, and ground force like paratroopers, and then also the southern command, and the intelligence unit, etc). so each incident, to investigate properly requires hundreds of hours of interviews, material and footage reviews, comparison with additional intelligence, and with past investigations done within the units themselves regarding the incidents in question etc.
I've already shown that these investigations are independent, and the people running them do not report to the IDF infrastructure - the very definition of independence. And when new evidence comes up, as HRW claims in the Al Bader flour mill case, the investigators re-open the cases.

Or would HRW prefer that the IDF re-invade Gaza to get first-hand forensics?

As a footnote, HRW again mentions the supposed "fact" that the Hamas police were not a legitimate target. I have shown that at least 75% of the police killed were members of the Al Qassam Martyrs Brigades, the organization responsible for a majority of attacks on Israel. I have shown that the Al Qassam Brigades as well as Hamas themselves do not distinguish between the police and the militants. Even Goldstone quotes the Hamas police as mentioning that "Police officers received clear orders from the leadership to face the enemy, if the Gaza Strip were to be invaded." (He then dismisses that very statement.) Anyone can look at the incredible PTWatch site and see first-hand the detailed obituaries that terror groups wrote to memorialize the police and other "civilians" killed during Cast Lead, including details of their terror careers and the dates that they joined the terror groups.

HRW does not address these findings, nor any other substantive criticism of their logic and methodology. HRW has no ability to defend itself or look at its own claims objectively. It appears that HRW's Joe Stork is engaging in a bit of projection when he accuses the IDF of something that applies far better to himself.
  • Sunday, February 07, 2010
  • Elder of Ziyon
UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon issued a report to the General Assembly, as a follow-up to the Goldstone Report, regarding implementation of Goldstone's recommendations.

Even though Hamas very publicly responded with its own report, the UN report ignored Hamas' submission altogether. It includes an annex with the entire contents of the Israeli update report and another with the Palestinian Authority response saying at the last minute that they are about to establish a fact-finding commission, but nothing from the Gaza government.

Saturday, February 06, 2010

  • Saturday, February 06, 2010
  • Elder of Ziyon
Good Arabs is Hillel Cohen's followup to his earlier book, Army of Shadows (review here.) Army of Shadows detailed the relationship between Jews and Arabs in Palestine before the 1948 war mostly from the viewpoint of early Zionist intelligence agencies. Good Arabs continues on this theme, looking at how the Israeli military and police establishments interacted with Israeli Arabs from 1948 to 1967.

As with the earlier book, Good Arabs is filled with variants of the pejorative term "collaborate." It seems probable that Cohen, who wrote the word in Hebrew, agreed with this translation of the Hebrew word "פעולה". However that Hebrew term has two translations: "collaborate" and "cooperate." When reading the book and mentally replacing the former with the latter, an entirely different impression is given.

To be sure, the Arabs living in Israel during those nineteen years did not have it easy. Most of them were under military rule and many of them saw their lands expropriated from them. Cohen looks at the phenomenon of Arabs who cooperated with the Israeli authorities and finds many reasons for their actions.

Some were opportunists; trying to ingratiate themselves with the strong horse. Some were realists, who felt that Israel wasn't going anywhere and the best strategy was to give the Jewish leaders what they wanted. Some wanted the perks that the Israelis would give to those who helped them - often guns and jobs. Some were, in fact, ideologically inclined to support Israel. Others played both sides of the fence, or, as in one case Cohen brings, played Israel, Egypt and Jordan against each other.

Based on voluminous declassified Israeli police material, much of which quoted the testimony of collaborators against Arabs who were deemed a threat to the state, Cohen attempts to reconstruct the psyche of the minority citizens of Israel during that time, concentrated mostly in the 1950s. Israeli authorities, often heavy-handedly, attempted to stop any "nationalist" discourse and replace the Palestinian Arab narrative with the Zionist narrative in Arab schools. Many Arabs resisted these attempts, others went along with it.

To his credit, Cohen does not try to generalize. He seems wedded to the Palestinian Arab narrative (it is jarring to see him use the word "Nakba" as if the term existed in the 1950s) but he willingly brings anecdotes about the Arabs who genuinely wanted to work with the Jews.

He goes into details about the Communists, who attracted many Arabs in the Triangle and northern regions and who were nominally supportive of Israel's existence but very much against the idea of a Jewish state. The Israeli authorities were keenly interested in Communist sympathizers among the Arabs and used their carrot-and-stick approach to minimize their influence.

As in the last book, Cohen uses the word "nationalists" a bit too freely; most of his examples do not seem to support the type of Palestinian Arab nationalism that we have become familiar with since 1967, but rather pan-Arabism.

Most Palestinian Arabs, especially before the rise of the PLO, cared far less about nationalism than they did about taking care of their families in honor. This simple fact is supported by Cohen's anecdotes, but he doesn't quite seem to grasp it himself. For example, he looks at the difficulty that Israel had to instill a strong Zionist ethos into their thinking as a failure, when in fact it is just the other side of the same coin of the apathy of Arabs towards their own nationalists. After all, the older generation of the 1950s Arabs had already lived under Ottoman, British and Israeli rule; to them their families were a far more permanent part of their lives than their rulers. This is why they worked hard to re-unite their families who were separated by the war. Sometimes this was done by smuggling them in and breaking the law; sometimes by being exceptionally cooperative with the Israelis who let a not-insignificant number return, and sometimes it was a combination of the two - bringing them in illegally and then appealing to past cooperation with Israelis, especially in 1948, to allow their relatives to stay.

The rise of Nasser and the seeming strength of the United Arab Republic union of Egypt and Syria convinced many Israeli Arabs that Israel would soon be destroyed; these Arabs tended to think in terms of how they could optimize their situations given that scenario playing out. Others analyzed the same facts and concluded that Israel was the power they needed to cooperate more with. These pragmatic issues usually trumped the ideological, and it does not appear likely that anyone thought that an Arab Palestine that would result from the Arabs sweeping the Jews into the sea would be any more independent than the West Bank Jordanians were. (One interesting footnote mentions that the Arabs of the Triangle were very happy when they ended up in the Jewish state after 1948, because the Iraqi fighters who had occupied their towns had a nasty habit of rape.)

Cohen also goes into detail into the different attitudes of the Druze, the Ciracassians and the Bedouin to the state, especially in terms of becoming members of the IDF. He notes that Israeli policy was to divide these groups and treat them separately from the mostly Muslim Arabs, which could be a method to help minimize the amount of danger that a united minority group could bring. However, he mentions that Israelis themselves justified this policy by accurately noting that the only reason there was any unity among those groups to begin with was because of the British policy of playing the Jews against the other minorities.

One shortcoming of the book is that after many specific examples of cooperation/collaboration throughout the 1950s by Arabs under Israeli military rule, Cohen dismisses the 1960s with a single paragraph mentioning that Israel's military government power waned, Israel's Arab citizens won more freedoms and then the military government apparatus dismantled in late 1966. There are no details, no examples, no discussion of how this affected the cooperators and the Israelis, especially on the eve of the Six Day War. He mentions that a significant number of Israeli Arabs were actively offering to help Israel on the eve of the war, even after the military government was gone and they were much closer to being equal citizens of the state. The entire seven years should have gotten more detailed attention.

Good Arabs sheds much light on 1950s Israeli Arabs and it demolishes some myths. As with Cohen's previous book, it is an important addition to understanding recent history and it gives us some lessons for today.
  • Saturday, February 06, 2010
  • Elder of Ziyon
Stop the presses! We have another story of an Israeli shaking hands with an Arab leader - and this time, it was in public!

The New York Times explains:
A handshake between an Israeli politician and a Saudi prince settled an unusual public diplomatic spat on Saturday about the seating arrangements at an international security conference.

Ayalon had accused Turki, a former Saudi intelligence chief and envoy to Washington and London, of orchestrating a decision to keep him off a panel involving other regional powers meant to discuss the security of the Middle East.

Ayalon began his talk saying it appeared "a representative of a country with a lot of oil" had pressed the organisers to separate the panel because he "did not want to sit with us."

This showed a lack of mutual respect and tolerance, a failing at the heart of the region's problems, he said.

In the subsequent question and answer session, Turki stood up in the audience and said it was not he who had objected and the splitting of the panel was probably due to Ayalon's "boorish behaviour" with Turkey's envoy to Israel.

Ayalon responded to Turki saying Turki had called into question his integrity. He added: "If indeed it was not him who objected to my being here with him, I would welcome him to shake my outstetched hand."

Turki approached the podium, Ayalon descended from it and the men grasped hands.

So far, I haven't seen any mention of this in the Saudi press. Stay tuned. I have a feeling that it will not go over well in the Kingdom.

  • Saturday, February 06, 2010
  • Elder of Ziyon
In one of the more ridiculous episodes in the farce of Hamas pretending to investigate its actions in Cast Lead, Reuters reported the Hamas government wrote that it "regrets any harm that may have befallen any Israeli civilian."

This is an obvious lie. Hamas rockets were doing nothing else but targeting civilians in Cast Lead, as I showed in a recent post. They just redefined Sderot and Ashkelon and Be'er Sheva and Kiryat Gat as "military bases" and kept right on shooting at the same civilian cities they always had.

Back in 2008, a very telling episode happened that may have been the very point in time when Hamas stopped publicly bragging about targeting civilians. Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri had a long interview in which he answered a series of questions from people, and in one of his answers he said:
I think I have responded to the sister I’laamiyyah’s first question previously. But in turn, I ask her: and what is HAMAS’s justification for killing those whose killing is not permitted from the children in the Israeli colonies with the blessed Qassam rockets which don’t differentiate between a child and an adult, and moreover, perhaps [don’t differentiate] between the Jews and the Arabs and Muslims working in those colonies or in the streets and markets of Occupied Palestine, even though the Shari’ah forbids their killing.
Al Qaeda was scolding Hamas for killing innocent children!

Hamas meekly answered:
"Hamas doesn't mean to kill children by its rockets," spokesman Ismail Radwan told reporters in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. His remarks were in response to al-Qaida's No. 2 leader Aymanal-Zawahiri who said Hamas' random rockets kill Jews women and children in violation of Islam law.

But Radwan added that "the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians may involve some killings of children."
Since that incident, Hamas has been more reticent in bragging about killing civilians.

In this case, though, Fatah made fun of Hamas for this apology, and in response Hamas denied apologizing.

UPDATE: To certain audiences, Hamas has no problems showing who it is targeting: (first poster and idea h/t sshender)




Friday, February 05, 2010

  • Friday, February 05, 2010
  • Elder of Ziyon
From Al Arabiya:
A 16-year-old girl was buried alive by relatives in southeast Turkey in a gruesome honor killing just because she reportedly befriended boys, the Anatolia news agency reported Thursday.

Acting on a tip-off, police discovered Medine Memi's body in a sitting position with her hands tied, in a two-meter-deep hole in a chicken pen outside her house in Kahta town, Adiyaman province, 40 days after she went missing, the agency said.

A subsequent post mortem revealed that she had a significant amount of soil in her lungs and stomach, meaning that she was buried alive, forensic experts told the agency.

"The autopsy result is blood-curdling. According to our findings, the girl, who had no bruises on her body and no sign of narcotics or poison in her blood, was alive and fully conscious when she was buried," one anonymous expert said.

Medine's father and grandfather have been formally arrested and jailed pending trial over her killing, the agency said.

The father is reported to have said in his testimony that the family was unhappy she had male friends.

In honor killings, most prevalent in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast, a so-called family council names a member to murder a female relative considered to have sullied the family honor, usually by engaging in an extra-marital affair.

But the practice has gone so far as to kill rape victims or women who simply talked to strange men.
This Kurdish murder shows that "honor killings" are not only an Arab problem.
  • Friday, February 05, 2010
  • Elder of Ziyon
30 ordinary kids managed to escape the "world's largest open-air prison:"
The U.S. Department of State sponsored a two-week visit to the U.S. focused on human rights and democracy for a group of 30 high school students from Gaza. Two separate groups of 15 girls and 15 boys were selected because of their outstanding performance in their human rights classes at UNRWA schools in Gaza. Along with their teachers, the students visited Atlanta; Washington, D.C.; and New York City.

While in Atlanta, the students met with former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, visited the Martin Luther King Center, and participated in discussions on conflict resolution, human rights, and democracy. In Washington, D.C., the students received a tour of the White House and Capitol Hill, saw a concert at the Kennedy Center, and had dinner with American high school students and their families. In New York City, the students met with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and saw a Broadway musical.

U.S. Consul General in Jerusalem Daniel Rubinstein met with the group upon their return to discuss their impressions of the United States. Consul General Rubinstein congratulated them, saying, “I hope your experience in the United States will help you as you become the future leaders of an independent Palestinian state.”
Hizb ut-Tahrir leaders in Gaza are furious. They warned that the US was trying to "brainwash" Gaza students, and said that this trip is meant to "water down the concepts of Islam and sacrifice in the hearts of the children through the dissemination of the infidel West toxins through the likes of these visits. [It is] an attempt to distort perceptions and introduce them to Western lifestyles and deceptive, abnormal manifestations of civil rights."

They also complained that the trip would make Western culture seem desirable to the students, which is completely unacceptable.
  • Friday, February 05, 2010
  • Elder of Ziyon
Last week, a total shutdown of Gaza's main power station was averted at the last minute by the PA agreeing to pay for the fuel, after the EU decided not to pay for Gaza fuel any more.

That fuel supply has run out, but today Israel is sending industrial fuel through the Kerem Shalom crossing. It is unclear who is paying for it.

PCHR, in an investigation, notes that the company that owns the power plant - one third owned by an American company - is making lots of money.
  • Friday, February 05, 2010
  • Elder of Ziyon
I have previously mentioned the disturbing fact that the Goldstone Report relied in a large part on a Hamas organization called TAWTHEQ as a source on basic facts in Operation Cast Lead. The organization's entire purpose is to document alleged Israeli "war crimes."

Jonathan Dahoah Halevi has revealed that Hamas' legal defense of its actions during the war were written by the exact same people who head TAWTHEQ. Their legal arguments rest on assumptions such as Hamas has the legal right to shoot rockets to Israel; that all of Israel is "occupied territory;" that Israel has no legal right to defend itself; that Hamas rockets were not aimed at civilians; that Sderot and other towns near Gaza are "occupied" because it was supposed to be part of the Arab state in the 1947 partition that Arabs rejected; and that there are legally no legitimate targets in Gaza.

As Halevi concludes,
A declared terrorist organization, which adheres to the Islamic law (sharia) as the only source of legitimacy and promotes ideology of genocide, receives legal support from human rights organizations and internationally respected jurists in its lawfare waged against a democratic state. Even more peculiar is Judge Richard Goldstone’s decision to rely without reservations on Tawtheeq and its experts in preparing its report, while they publicly make a travesty of the international law and argue that Israel violated the Palestinians’ rights to kill Israelis in the armed struggle for the liberation of the land of Palestine and to destroy Israel.
Let's look into more detail as to what TAWTHEQ data Goldstone relied upon or quoted uncritically:

- The number of fatalities and the number of women and children killed (TAWTHEQ's numbers are higher than PCHR and Al Mezan; Goldstone gives them equal weight. Also, TAWTHEQ does not even attempt to distinguish between militant and civilian in its list of victims.)

- The number of "police stations" targeted by Israel (would TAWTHEQ define Al Qassam Brigades buildings as "police stations?)

- The size of material damage in various strikes, in dollar amounts;

- Most damningly, a large amount of "evidence" that supported the flawed testimony of witnesses to the commission, often the only corroborating evidence Goldstone cites (para. 788, 823)

Goldstone did not show the least amount of skepticism in reviewing the information given to him by an organization whose entire existence is based on bias and not on researching the truth.

And now, we see that Goldstone accepted "evidence" from people who believe, a priori, that Hamas can do no wrong and Israel is inherently evil.

Thursday, February 04, 2010

  • Thursday, February 04, 2010
  • Elder of Ziyon
From the Salem News:
A high level Pakistani diplomat has been rejected as Ambassador of Saudi Arabia because his name, Akbar Zib, equates to "Biggest Dick" in Arabic. Saudi officials, apparently overwhelmed by the idea of the name, put their foot down and gave the idea of his being posted there, the kibosh.
Foreign Policy Blog adds:
According to this Arabic-language article in the Arab Times, Pakistan had previously floated Zeb's name as ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, only to have him rejected for the same reason. One can only assume that submitting Zeb's name to a number of Arabic-speaking countries is some unique form of punishment designed by the Pakistani Foreign Ministry -- or the result of a particularly egregious cockup.
The autotranslation of the Arab Times article is priceless, and while humor doesn't translate well, it appears that the author was having a good time with the story - all the while claiming that no one knows why the diplomat was rejected:
Diplomatic sources familiar with United Arab Emirates told the Arab Times that the current tensions between Pakistan and GCC can not be considered an extension of the tension between Pakistan and the United States, but one cause of tension made Pakistan reject the Arab Gulf Cooperation Council of accepting the credentials of (the biggest cock) a new Pakistani ambassador to several States of the Cooperation Council, without giving reasons ... .. The Pakistani government has decided to appoint (the biggest cock) ambassador in the UAE, but its request was turned down .. I tried to set in Bahrain, which was rejected request and receive instructions sent to Saudi Arabia in the possible appointment as ambassador to the Saud's rejection, such as Saudi Arabia United Arab Emirates and Bahrain is not an excuse did not explain the reasons prompting the Pakistani government to Alaatqald that there is U.S. pressure to prevent the appointment of (the biggest cock) Ambassador to the Council states GCC.

There was still no statement from the GCC countries on the reason for refusing to accept the appointment (the biggest cock) ambassador to Pakistan. The Arab Times was not able to know the reason too, but after research and investigation shows that the Pakistani diplomat (the biggest dick) is one of the biggest specialists in the Pak-US economic relations and has held an important post in successive Pakistani governments will be responsible for US-Pakistan Economic Relations.

But the GCC do not want (the biggest cock) and object to the appointment and refused to give his reasons . But a fellow of the Arab Times said that acceptance of the appointment of Abu Dhabi, for example the biggest cock ambassador requires dissemination of news from the Emirates News Agency says: His Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed today received the President of Pakistan's new ambassador to the State's largest cock ... Who presented his credentials to His Highness Sheikh Khalifa ... And His Excellency (the biggest dick) was pleased to meet His Highness Sheikh who carried (the biggest cock) presents his compliments to the people of Pakistan.

What do you think is the reason for the refusal to accept the largest dick in the GCC?
h/t Richard Landes via email
  • Thursday, February 04, 2010
  • Elder of Ziyon
There has been a few mentions in the JBlogosphere about a campaign to get Costco to stop carrying Israeli clementines.

From what I can tell, it isn't much of a campaign; an email that has been circulated for a few weeks doesn't seem to have gotten much traction. I see lots more pro-Israel postings about the campaign than anti-Israel postings.

But that doesn't mean you shouldn't buy Israeli goods from Costco!

Last Sunday, before I heard about this campaign, I bought Jaffa Sweeties and also saw Carmel peppers being sold. And I wasn't even looking.

So, tonight, drop by a Costco, buy some Israeli goods and let the store manager know you are doing it.
  • Thursday, February 04, 2010
  • Elder of Ziyon

h/t LGF
  • Thursday, February 04, 2010
  • Elder of Ziyon
A Jewish Brooklyn website is advertising "the first ever Israeli Keffiyeh!"

Here is the rationale from Shemspeed's founder, Erez Safar:
My family originates from Yemen, where my ancestors had lived for close to 2,000 years. Nearly 100 years ago, my Grandmother’s side of the family decided to move to Adis Ababa, Ethiopia and then to Israel, in 1933 (Southern Syria/Mandate Palestine at the time). On my Grandfather’s side, our family emigrated to Israel in 1924. Jews indigenous to the Middle East, such as my family is, have worn some variation of the “kefyah” (cap/kippah) and keffiyah (head/neck scarves) for thousands of years. The original purpose of the scarves, was to provide protection from the sun and sand. We have had some Arab friends take offense to our new scarf-remix. In response to such, I thought it was essential to release this statement in order to clarify the historical facts on the ground and, to provide some context. I as a Jew am not offended by the Pope who wears a “kippah” and in the same respect, I don’t feel there is any reason for anyone taking offense to a Jewish person wearing a version of the Keffiyah which they identify with; especially considering the significance of this article of clothing in both of all of our histories. There are numerous variations of the Keffiyah today; the red and white Keffiyah is associated with Jordan and worn throughout the Middle East and Somalia and have been worn by Bedouins for centuries. The black and white Keffiyah, idolized in the 1960s by Yasser Arafat, has become the symbol of the Palestinian resistance movement. The way that symbols are politicized and used to divide people, rather than as common ground for discussion and dialogue is exactly the kind of thought-provoking topic that we at Shemspeed explore with our music, as well as our programming. Our Israeli remix of the Keffiyeh, available through Shemspeed, is just one more interpretation of a scarf worn by our brothers for thousands of years. We hope you enjoy them.

And not everyone is amused. After the UAE National newspaper picked up on the story from the Jerusalem Post, the Kipp Report whines:

Safar knows exactly what he’s doing. The ‘Israeli’ keffiyeh has not been created to keep off the notoriously hot sun or blinding sandstorms that hit Brooklyn at this time of year. It’s an attempt to make a mockery of this symbol of Palestinian nationalism.

As The National points out today, the likely row over a ‘Jewish’ keffiyeh will be the latest in a series of clashes over cultural symbols in the Middle East. In 2008, for example, a group of Lebanese businessmen announced plans to sue Israel to stop it from marketing hummus and tabouleh as ‘Israeli’.

But the creation of the ‘Israeli’ keffiyeh has somewhat raised the stakes. Safar has taken direct aim at this instantly-recognizable Arab symbol, and personal trademark of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Are these “young, hip US Jews” simply deluded, or are they being consciously antagonistic?


There is some deja vu here. A British company has been marketing the Keffiyeh Israelit (pictured, right) for years - and the Arabs have been complaining about it for just as long. (The British manufacturer used to visit and comment here.)

And the reason that Palestinian Arabs don't like Jews co-opting their keffiyeh? Because it symbolizes PalArab "resistance" - terrorism!

Meanwhile, in Nablus, the PalArabs are trying to set a new Guinness world record by creating the world's largest keffiyeh, 500 meters long. The Friends of Palestine group, which is sponsoring it, plans to complete the project in March and then will bring the scarf to refugee camps to cheer people up.
  • Thursday, February 04, 2010
  • Elder of Ziyon
From the Huffington Post:
Two senior Egyptian editors – one a member of the country's ruling party and the other an expert on Jewish affairs – have been punished by Egypt's Journalists Union for violating its ban on contacts with Israel, in a case that underlines the country's ambivalent policies toward its neighbor.

Egypt in 1979 became the first Arab nation to sign a peace treaty with Israel, but relations have remained cool since, with government-to-government contacts dominating links between the two nations.

Cultural exchanges and travel to Israel are officially discouraged by the government, while popular sentiments remain mostly hostile toward Israel because of its perceived oppression of the Palestinians.

Egypt's Journalists Union issued the ban on contacts with Israel in 1985. Yet, many Egyptian journalists have traveled to Israel since and escaped punishment.

On Tuesday, however, the union reprimanded Hala Mustafa, editor in chief of the state-run weekly Democratiya, or Democracy, for meeting with Israel's ambassador in Egypt. Hussein Serag, the expert on Jewish affairs and deputy editor of the weekly magazine October, was suspended from writing for three months.

Asharq Alawsat adds:

The committee "took into account" that Mustafa had "given assurances she was not familiar with the details of this ruling on normalisation. She thought it only applied to travelling to Israel."

He added that Mustafa had agreed to respect the 1981 ruling, something she would neither confirm nor deny.

However, she said she "totally" rejected the warning, telling AFP she might even turn to the courts for redress of what she said was a "moral injury."

"It goes against freedom of expression ... which the union should protect," she added.

  • Thursday, February 04, 2010
  • Elder of Ziyon

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

  • Wednesday, February 03, 2010
  • Elder of Ziyon
Hamas says it has sent a "barrage" of floating bombs into the Mediterranean with the hope that it would hit Israeli targets and explode.

The Free Gaza movement is planning to send a flotilla of 10 boats to Gaza this spring.

Hmmm.
  • Wednesday, February 03, 2010
  • Elder of Ziyon
A new poll of Gazans by the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion shows a number of interesting trends.According to this poll, oOrdinary Gazans tend to be more pragmatic and less extremist than Hamas, and in general they support Fatah more than Hamas.

One answer was intriguing: when asked who benefits most from the smuggling tunnels, 49.7% said "Hamas" and only 26.4% said "the people." Sounds like the "human rights" organizations that keep calling the tunnels a "lifeline" are out of step with what ordinary Gazans think.

According to the poll, Gazans also overwhelmingly support a "one-state solution," probably because of how the question was phrased. (A different poll from another organization found overwhelming support for the opposite.)

And 40% of Gazans would jump at the chance to emigrate to a Western country if they had the chance.

Unlike others, this poll did not ask whether Gazans support terror attacks against Israeli civilians. That number seems to have gone down slightly in the most recent PCPO poll: it is now "merely" 43%, with 57.4% of Gazans supporting terror.
  • Wednesday, February 03, 2010
  • Elder of Ziyon
A fascinating article in The National:
Abu Mahdi spends most of his day sitting in a plastic chair in front of a dilapidated concrete block shack on the outskirts of Beirut’s southern suburbs puffing on a water pipe and pouring coffee for a steady stream of visitors and customers that have come to examine his inventory.

Two of his first customers on a cold winter morning are young fighters in their late teens from the militant Shiite movement Hizbollah who are enraptured with a selection of gleaming new 9mm handguns from Belgium, the United States and the Czech Republic.

But these young fighters make only about US$400 (Dh1,500) a month for their work in “The Resistance”, putting the sleek automatic pistols, listed at $2,000 each, well outside their price range.

Although Hizbollah obviously issues military-grade weaponry to its fighters, the boys say only the highest-ranking members – leadership, undercover operatives, bodyguards and security teams – are given pistols, making them a critical, if expensive, status symbol among the youngest fighters, who have been known to take second jobs or save for years just to add private weapons to their inventory.

The group does not buy its weaponry on Lebanon’s back market, according to people familiar with its acquisitions process, but from the international black market. Hizbollah’s arms also come direct from Iran and Syria.

A few minutes after the Hizbollah gunmen arrive, a jeep from the Internal Security Forces, Lebanon’s federal police force, pulls up outside the shack but neither Mr Mahdi nor his militant customers seem worried. The police officers have arrived to pick up two assault rifles that they ordered a few weeks earlier. They seem to know the fighters and all start happily chatting and playing with the dozens of weapons stuffed in the back of Mr Mahdi’s truck.

...“I am exhausted,” [Mahdi] says, thanks to non-stop business demands. “I am making a lot of money but I have no time to sleep. Anyone who tells you that Lebanon is peaceful and stable is lying. Everyone is buying weapons; I can’t keep up.”

.... Arms dealers have used an interesting metric for judging the stability of the country: the price of the ubiquitous AK-47 assault rifle.

“There were so many AKs in the country at the end of the war that it’s almost pointless to import them, everyone just sells the same guns back and forth,” Mr Mahdi says. “So I can tell you, according to the price of one gun, how Lebanon is looking. And things are not good.”

Just before the death of the former prime minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005, whose assassination ushered in Lebanon’s longest period of chaos since the end of the civil war, a new model AK-47 in very good condition could be bought for $300. A month after his death, the price had doubled to $600. By the outbreak of the July 2006 war between Hizbollah and Israel, it had tripled to $900 as people expected either an occupation by Israel or ongoing civil strife in the aftermath.

“The war was terrible for Lebanon but I made $10,000 profit in just a few weeks,” Mr Mahdi admits. “But prices just kept rising.”

He says the high point for the price of the AK-47 was in the period of major Sunni and Shiite sectarian tension that preceded the May 2008 clashes between Hizbollah and its allies against groups of Sunnis loyal to the government.

“In the days before the action, I knew that something was going to happen because prices jumped to $1,300 per AK,” he said. “It’s come down just a little but business is too much for this peace to last. Everyone is walking the streets acting all good, but they’re lying.”

This prediction is based on several factors, according to Mr Mahdi. The first is a widespread concern by Hizbollah that al Qa’eda-style groups, who cannot resist having their biggest enemies – the Shiite and Israel – in such close proximity, will target Lebanon. The second problem is a lack of faith in Lebanon’s government.

“There is no government, those people are useless,” says Mr Mahdi. “No one trusts them to keep the peace, so everyone buys weapons to protect their homes and families. Normally I sell about 30 to 40 machine guns a month but right now, it’s double that. And the price is $1,200 for a gun in good condition, almost as high as May 2008.”

“But I know there is a real problem on the streets right now not just because of the machine guns but because I am selling so many RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) launchers. People only buy grenades when they think war is coming. An RPG isn’t really a weapon you use to protect your house, but everyone is buying them anyway. Not good.”

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