Wednesday, August 10, 2011

  • Wednesday, August 10, 2011
  • Elder of Ziyon
After years of dragging its feet, Egypt finally implemented a 2006 court ruling and allowed 607 Palestinian Arabs with Egyptian mothers to become citizens of Egypt.

Tens of thousands of Gazans have applied for Egyptian citizenship, some paying huge sums to lawyers to help make their case.

In 1959, the Arab League resolution 1547 confirmed earlier resolutions calling on Arab countries to treat Palestinian Arabs well - but recommends that they "retain their Palestinian nationality." Meaning, that Palestinian Arabs should not obtain citizenship in their host countries.

Every time a loophole has emerged in various countries allowing Palestinian Arabs to become citizens, they eagerly flock to take advantage of it.

Yet the world human rights community is silent - or, in the case of Human Rights Watch, complicit - in this gross violation of not only the human rights of Palestinian Arabs, but of their very will to become naturalized in the countries in which they were born.

It is very simple. Palestinian Arabs have shown time and time again that they want to be citizens of their host countries. Their right to a nationality is being categorically denied. But the UN, HRW and other NGOs, instead of fighting for them, are parroting the lies of their so-called leaders that they prefer to remain stateless and part of the "Palestinian nation."

The human rights of millions of people are being systematically denied, and no one is standing up for them. Not only that, but the worst offenders are the very people who claim to be acting on their behalf!

Ma'an reported last night:

Telecommunications in Gaza were severed late Tuesday, cutting off Internet, mobile phones and international landline connections for hours, a Ma'an correspondent reported.

Calls to Gaza were met with error messages or dial tones, and the blackout seemed to affect multiple platforms including regular landline services as well as mobile access including Israeli services.

Meanwhile, residents of Gaza near the border with Israel said army bulldozers were seen operating shortly before communications went offline. An army spokeswoman denied the account.
Tweeters were abuzz with the news, and many assumed that this was a deliberate act on Israel's part as preparation for some genocidal act. Ma'an's comments were typical:

yeah people here expecting big israeli assault on Gaza tonight. an from Gaza but can't state how i access in order not be interrupted by occupation(israeli entity)

israel is getting ready to attack,get ready
And on Twitter:
world focused on #londonriots , no one care about #GazaBlackout , have been for 12+ hour, israeli getting ready to attack

IMEMC darkly hinted that this was in preparation for an attack.

Max Blumenthal went further,asserting that this was a deliberate attack by Israel on Gaza:
Does #J14 have anything to say on Israel's terror attack on Gaza's civilian infrastructure? #GazaBlackout
He then realized he went a teeny bit too far:
Qualification: -alleged- terror attack on Gaza's civilian infrastructure. Still awaiting official gloating.
Alas, his deep knowledge of evil Israeli psychology was again off the mark. The IDF spokesperson tweeted this morning:
Contrary 2inaccurate rumors, IDF has no conectn to #GazaBlackout. last nght #IDF bulldozer didn't dig @ Nahal Oz. #transparency
Indeed, there were no bulldozers cutting cables, no massive invasion of Gaza, no airstrikes, and this morning after 12 hours the communications are slowly being restored - without Israel apparently doing anything to repair it. As usual, the Arab and anti-Israel rumor mill was way off base, not that anyone will admit it.

There can be only a few alternatives to explain this:

  • The IDF is lying.
  • There was a huge coincidence where landlines, cell phone lines and Internet all went down at the same time (there were some reports of electricity being shut off as well.)
  • Hamas has something to do with this.
I don't know if there is a single point of failure in Gaza's telecommunications lines; that information is important in determining whether it was a simple backhoe mistake or not. If there is a single point through which all of Gaza's communications flows, that is an astoundingly bad network architecture (although it is great for Israeli intelligence.) This article in Firas Press, if I am understanding it correctly, seems to say that there are three separate fiber-optic cables going into Gaza and that all of them were down.

I find it most interesting that people automatically assume that Israel is nefariously attempting to wage war under cover in Gaza, yet they cannot conceive that Hamas might be doing a dry run on how easily it can cut off Gaza from the world.

After all, Syria has been cutting the communications of towns that are being attacked, and the Arab world has a rich history of working overtime to censor and restrict freedom of expression. 

So how come practically no one is blaming Hamas?
  • Wednesday, August 10, 2011
  • Elder of Ziyon
From YNet:

According to the Islamic Jihad's website, the military wing recently held maneuvers in which veteran members of the Jihad who had been injured over the years in battles with Israeli forces had a starring role.

The maneuvers included sights not usually seen on the battlefield, one-legged men carrying Kalashnikov rifles or RPG launchers while leaning on crutches or sitting in wheelchairs.

The Islamic Jihad has puffed up its position against Hamas as the group spearheading the struggle against Israel. The organization has gone all out on a PR campaign to glorify its fighters in the Gaza Strip – the height of the campaign is their latest exhibition maneuver.

"Bombing us and leaving us amputees will not stop the Jihad," the military wing's website quoted one militant, Abu Abdallah who lost both his legs in clashes near Khan Yunis. "We will continue to fight even when our bodies are torn to pieces."
In all seriousness, this really means that they will try to send disabled people through checkpoints and so forth with bomb belts.

Making life for truly sick people who need to be treated in Israel that much more arduous. And giving a propaganda victory to the anti-Israel crowd.


Tuesday, August 09, 2011

  • Tuesday, August 09, 2011
  • Elder of Ziyon
Hussein Ibish writes about a new book that describes the clothing styles that Arabs in Palestine used throughout the centuries, and he finds it terrifically important.

First, let's talk about the costumes:
Munayyer’s important new book demonstrates a number of very salient points with serious implications about the present and future for the Palestinian people. First, it shows that traditional and folkloric Palestinian costumes are distinctive from other Levantine ones. Within Palestinian society, in various areas and villages, the costumes have their own particular features, handed down largely from mother to daughter, over decades and indeed centuries. But there is still a distinctive Palestinian style, strongly connected to other Levantine traditional dress, with forms and patterns all their own.

I do not have the book, so I cannot say with certainty whether this is true or not. I can say that there were a few styles of clothing within Palestine; Wikipedia divides them up into northern Palestine, central Palestine, the coastal plane and the Bedouin. In order to prove that there was a distinctive "Palestinian" style one must prove that all of these styles had more commonality when compared to other Levantine clothing styles. Moreover, the similarities must be of the same amount that one would find similarities in the costumes of different areas of Syria or Arabia or Egypt.

To do this would require someone who is objective to look at the similarities and differences between costumes throughout history in the Middle East and find commonalities among the Palestinian Arab costumes that are provably different from the others. If they were fundamentally regional, they prove nothing.

To put it another way, it would be deceptive to say that the existence of jazz or creole cuisine or blue jeans proves that there is a distinctive American culture. These all started off as examples of regional culture, not national culture; they became "American" as they spread throughout the US.

If Palestinian Arab costumes remained regional, that is not evidence of a Palestinian national identity. It is simply evidence that different regions in the Levant had different cultural symbols. If the northern Palestinian costumes have more in common with the Lebanese costumes than with the coastal costumes, then the truth is  the opposite of what Ibish is claiming.

But, as Ibish shows, Palestinian Arabs have been thirsting to prove that they had a distinctive culture for hundreds or thousands of years, and therefore it is - pretty much by his admission - impossible for such a work to be written without a political subtext:

[D]ocumenting that history and those traditions is not only a vital project of collective memory and an important academic task in itself, it is also a quintessentially political act. It is, above all, an act of passionate, dedicated and deeply meaningful resistance to the continued efforts at the negation of Palestinian identity and history.

This is Palestinian sumud, or steadfastness, at its finest. Beyond bluster, slogans and canned rhetoric, Munayyer’s volume has something deeply serious and meaningful to say about both the origins and the future of Palestinian national identity.
I've been spending a bit of time looking for specific Palestinian Arab culture, and every claim I've come across so far has been either Levantine - like falafel or the debka - or very specific to a town (like the soaps that Nablus was known for.)

By the way, Jewish women of Palestine also had their own distinctive clothing, especially Sephardic women. Would their dress be considered "Palestinian"? Does this book even research how the Jewish women of Palestine dressed? The inclusion or omission of that community would tell a lot about how objective the book it.

Ibish also makes a common mistake as he, like many Palestinian Arabs, like to misquote Golda Meir:
The days are long gone when Golda Meir’s infamous remark about the Palestinians is still taken seriously in the West. The onetime Israeli prime minister stated that “[t]here is no such thing as a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist.” Yet there remains a hard-core contingent among Israelis and pro-Israel Westerners who persist in denying Palestinians their identity, history and heritage.

I have not yet found the original quote, which was supposedly written in The Sunday Times in 1969, but Wikiquote writes it this way:

There were no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.
There is nothing inaccurate about this quote. Certainly Ibish would be hard pressed to find that ordinary Arabs who lived in Palestine self-identified as "Palestinians" before 1920, and even more hard-pressed to find anyone who described themselves that way before Zionism existed. Today, arguably, there is a Palestinian Arab people who gained this identity because of their common misery at the hands of their Arab brethren, but Meir was referring to the Arabs of Palestine before Zionism.

In short, the attempts by Palestinian Arabs to construct a culture retroactively smacks of desperation. No one is arguing that there were no Arabs who lived in Palestine or even that some of them had distinctive dress or cuisine. The idea that there was a pan-Palestinian Arab culture that somehow fits roughly along the boundaries of Mandate Palestine that were drawn by the British is simply not true.

Deep down, Ibish knows this as well, just as he knows that the attempts to find such a culture are not based on finding the truth nearly as much as they are purely political.
  • Tuesday, August 09, 2011
  • Elder of Ziyon
Last month, the Sahara restaurant opened on the Gaza coast.

So once again I feel compelled to share with you some of the wrenching photos:






It isn't far from another prison restaurant, the Gaza Lighthouse Restaurant and Cafe, which also has a Facebook page.


But it is difficult to look at so much suffering at once.
  • Tuesday, August 09, 2011
  • Elder of Ziyon
From Palestine Times:
For the second consecutive day, Israeli occupation forces allowed Zionist to storm and desecrate the Aqsa Mosque...

There is a state of turmoil and tension in the squares of Al Aqsa Mosque after the Israeli police allowed extremist Jewish groups for the second consecutive day to desecrate the area and perform biblical and talmudic prayers on the occasion of the so-called 'memory of the destruction of the Temple', which occurred today. This raised public anger and indignation.
If you want to see the scenes of violence and mayhem, just go over to Palestine Today where they have a photo essay showing the entire desecration in gory detail:



Perhaps they would have been less offensive if they played soccer instead.
The always fascinating Iranian news agency IRNA reports:

Renowned Zionist archeologist Israel Wanklestein claimed Monday despite Israel’s claims there is absolutely no historic proof for presence of Jews in Jerusalem (occupied Holy Qods) in the past.

According to IRNA Audiovisual Monitoring Service, the Qods-Press News Agency which has quoted the Israeli archeologist has further reiterated:

Wankelstein who is considered as the father of archeology in occupied Palestine further stressed that the Jewish archeologists have thus far presented no historic proof for some stories quoted in the Old Testament on deportation of the Jews from the city, and their wandering in Sinai Desert, or victory of Joshua the son of Nunn in war against the Canaanites.

The Jewish archeologist focusing on Solomon’s Temple issue, said, “There is absolutely no historic proof over the existence of that temple where Israel says it is located.”
They are referring to Israel Finkelstein, a Tel Aviv University archaeologist who is known to be critical about the accuracy of Biblical history.

The story they are quoting comes from Middle East Monitor (MEMO), a UK-based Islamist-oriented news site. MEMO, in turn, claims that they got this information from an interview Finkelstein gave to The Jerusalem Post.

I cannot find any such interview in the Jerusalem Post.

However, I found an article about an interview with Finkelstein from last year in Biblical Archaeology Review. According to that article, Finkelstein - despite his skepticism - admits that Solomon built the Temple in Jerusalem.


Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, a stone was found with an engraved image of a menorah, along with a sword and scabbard that belonged to a Roman soldier.

And then there's this.

UPDATE:
Finkelstein, skepticism and all, writes pretty much the opposite of what Iran claims in this piece in The Forward:

Contrary to Palestinian claims, there is a scholarly consensus that the Temple Mount was indeed the location of the two Temples. Orthodox Jewish and Muslim sensitivities, however, have prevented modern archaeological work on the Temple Mount, which for the past 1,300 years has been the site of two Islamic holy places, the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Archaeological attention has therefore been diverted to the ridge to its south, where remains dating from the Bronze and Iron Ages were detected as early as the mid-19th century.

From the outset of modern exploration, the City of David produced exciting discoveries. Truly thrilling finds include the Siloam Inscription, a late-8th-century BCE Hebrew inscription that commemorates the hewing of a water tunnel under the ridge. Other important recent discoveries are the Pool of Siloam, dating from the Roman period, and the monumental street that connected it with the Temple Mount — places that were frequented by thousands during the three pilgrimage festivals each year.


  • Tuesday, August 09, 2011
  • Elder of Ziyon
From UPI:

Syrian President Bashar Assad swore in Gen. Dawood Rajiha as the country's defense minister Tuesday, the state news agency said.

The official Syrian Arab News Agency reports Assad received Rajiha, a Christian, as the new defense minister "and provided him with his directives."

The announcement followed reports that former Defense Minister Gen. Ali Habib was found dead in his home Tuesday. SANA noted only that Habib "has been ill for some time, and his health condition deteriorated recently."
Arabic media is quoting Syrian sources as claiming that he died a "natural death."

Well, it might be natural in Syria.

Meanwhile, the photo in Sana of the new defense minister being sworn in looks a lot like a photo that others thought was Photoshopped that Syria released a couple of weeks ago of the swearing on of the new governor of Hama.

The July photo:

Today's photo:

Does it look like they were in the room at the same time? Or that they were in that room at all? Maybe is Assad learned levitation, or now not to cast a shadow.

UPDATE: It seems that the reported-dead minister was on TV denying that he was sacked.

Monday, August 08, 2011

  • Monday, August 08, 2011
  • Elder of Ziyon
Here is a video taken a few months ago of Arab kids playing soccer on the Temple Mount:


More photos of the same phenomenon taken over the past few years:



This is why we should cry on Tisha B'Av.

The most sacred place on Earth is being defiled and desecrated, daily, by people whose entire reason for being there is in order to deny its rightful owners from asserting their claim.

If the Temple had been built elsewhere, the Al Aqsa Mosque would have still been built on top of it. And everyone knows it.

Muslims wouldn't dare play ball in the Kaaba in Mecca. But in this supposed "third holiest place" it is not even considered rude.

It would be preferable to leave it as unused ruins than to allow these people to defile the holy place every day.

Yes, it is wonderful that Israel was reborn and that Jews can live freely and proudly in Jerusalem again. But the disgrace of the Temple Mount shows that the redemption is not here.

And for that we need to keep crying.

Other Tisha B'Av postings:
2006
2007
2010


I will not be posting again until at least Tuesday afternoon. I wish my readers an easy fast and through our prayers may there be a true, complete redemption.
  • Monday, August 08, 2011
  • Elder of Ziyon
From DayLife/Reuters:
Wasieef, a Maaz Al Shami (Damascene goat), which won the first prize for the "Most Beautiful Goat" title in the female category, is seen at the Mazayen al-Maaz competition in Amman July 22, 2011. This is the first goat competition held in Jordan.


Saab Al Manal, a Maaz Al Shami (Damascene goat), which won the first prize for the "Most Beautiful Goat" title in the male category, is seen at the Mazayen al-Maaz competition in Amman July 22, 2011. 
Just imagine how heartbreakingly beautiful their kids would be if they got together!

(h/t Jeff Jacoby)
  • Monday, August 08, 2011
  • Elder of Ziyon
In response to the massive demonstration that the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations hijacked at Tahrir Square on July 29th, a coalition of Copts and Egyptian liberals plan to create their own demonstration this Friday in the symbolically-important square.

Al Arabiya reports that many national, liberal, Coptic and leftist social movements are planning an "Friday Civilian Egyptian" rally with the slogan "Together in love with Egypt, the revolution" on Friday. In a press conference today they stated that they intend to deliver a message directly to Egypt, that all Egyptians enjoy full citizenship without discrimination based on ethnic, sexual or religious grounds. They emphasize the civilian Egyptian state, where the rule of law applies to all and religion is not part of the political process, under the banner of unity.

They are planning an interesting gimmick: the world's largest Iftar in Tahrir Square to break that day's Ramadan fast. This is very smart, as it would blunt any Islamist criticism of the protest and it would get more people to come. Hey, free food, plus a chance to make history!

Friday may be a very important day in Egyptian history.

  • Monday, August 08, 2011
  • Elder of Ziyon
From Now Lebanon:
Bahrain has recalled its ambassador from Syria for "consultation," Foreign Minister Sheikh Khaled bin Ahmad Al-Khalifa said on Monday, following the example of neighbors Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

"Bahrain is recalling its ambassador in Damascus for consultation, and has called for a resort to reason," said Sheikh Khaled in a brief statement on his Twitter page.

King Abdullah of oil-rich Saudi Arabia led the way on Sunday when he strongly condemned the deadly crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Syria and recalled Riyadh's envoy from Damascus.

Kuwait followed on Monday, with Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammad Al-Sabah telling reporters that "no one can accept the bloodshed in Syria" and that the "military option must be halted."

But something happened in Syria that might get the world community to wake up and demand action:
A young Palestinian died early Monday morning in Syria's Hama refugee camp, bringing to six the number of Palestinians killed in Syria in a week, official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported.

On Friday, eyewitnesses said five Palestinian refugees were killed during clashes near the camp, which lies within the town of the same name, that has been the site of the fiercest battles between the protest movement and the Syrian regime.
I mean, regular Arabs killing Arabs is no big deal, but when Palestinian Arabs are killed, we know how upset people get.

Or does that depend on who does the killing?

(h/t David G)

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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 14 years and 30,000 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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