Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, September 21, 2014

Arab Racism and Insipid Western Apologies (Mike Lumish)

I have had it.

There comes a point where the level of disgust reaches such a crescendo that it makes me want to rip my left arm directly out of the socket so as to beat myself senseless with it.

{Now there is an image for you to carry through your day!}

Look, I have a question. How is it that western-left venues always harp on alleged Jewish atrocities in the Middle East, such as the latest wholly justified Gaza incursion, while almost entirely ignoring the much more significant and perverse Muslim-on-Muslim, Sunni versus Shia violence throughout that part of the world featuring beheadings, no less?

It is profoundly unjust, which is part of the reason that Matti Friedman's work for Tablet magazine uncovering institutionalized anti-Israel / anti-Jewish media bias in "Operation Protective Edge" resonates so well.

A few years ago I wrote a brief piece entitled, Israel 1242 - Tibet 18 which garnered some attention and in which I noticed the following:

A basic tag search of the Daily Kos blog reveals that between Feb 21, 2009 and today there were a grand total of 18 essays on the topic of Tibet. That is a total of 18 essays over the period of about 13 months on a left political blog with over 200,000 registered users. During that exact same period of time, however, there were 1242 diaries on the subject of Israel...

In truth, these people do not really care about human rights at all for if they did they would care about the human rights of people who do not happen to live in Ramallah or Gaza City. If they honestly cared about human rights they would care about the Tibetans. They would care about Darfur. They would care about Congo and Chechnya.

They don't.

1242 to 18.

The blatant hypocrisy is astounding.

The point, of course, is that the grassroots / netroots of the Democratic party in the United States, and the western-progressive left, as a whole, excoriates Israel far-and-away out of all proportion to Israeli-Jewish sins. Those who read these pages know this. The problem is getting the rest of them to understand the nature of the ongoing misinformation campaign against the Jews of the Middle East.

Let us look at one small example from Peter Beinart that the Elder quoted last Thursday, September 18.

Beinart claims:

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the story of a powerful state oppressing a stateless people. But it’s also the story of rival, equally legitimate, nationalisms.

This is simply, wholly, and entirely false.

These two brief lines show us very clearly that Beinart has swallowed the so-called "Palestinian narrative" whole. He lapped up every ounce of poison cream and believes wholeheartedly in The Great Inversion of 1967 that Joshua Muravchik recently wrote about in Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel and that the Elder recently reviewed. Beinart's first big mistake, therefore, is buying into the nonsense that the conflict is between a powerful state and a small, helpless, largely innocent native population.

This is not only false, it is precisely the Arab propaganda line that the PLO first started hawking, upon Soviet tutelage, in the mid 1960s. It sounds good from a semi-academic, post-colonial, Edward Saidian perspective, but it also happens to be historical hogwash.

There is no "Israeli-Palestinian conflict." What there is is an Arab conflict with everyone else in that part of the world, including the Jews. We must make it very clear that this is an ongoing, millenia-long aggression by the majority Arab populations against all minorities in the Middle East. The problem arises when we allow acidic and ignorant individuals such as Beinart to decontextualize the conflict by making it seem that Jews are the aggressors when, in fact, Jews are defending themselves from an exceedingly aggressive and hostile Arab majority, as are others, such as the Copts and the Kurds.

The question of Israel is a question of the civil liberties and human rights of the Jewish people. The Arabs hold well over ninety-nine percent of the landmass of the Middle East and control twenty-one countries. These are Algeria, Bahrain, the Comoros Islands, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Mauritania, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.

And, yet, Peter Beinart thinks that the Jewish people, his own people - a people held under a system of submission to a foreign power for thirteen long centuries - needs to cut itself in half to give a state to its enemies on its own minuscule bit of land. And he thinks so despite the fact that the Arabs have always and perpetually turned down the two-state offer. They turned it down in '37 and '47 and '67 and 2000 and 2008... and every moment and every day in between.

Furthermore, the "Palestinians" are not a stateless people quite simply because they are not a distinct and separate ethnicity. The conquering Arabs represent something close to 400 million people throughout that part of the world and they have, over the centuries since Muhammad, claimed all of that territory for themselves while driving out and persecuting both Christians and Jews and all non-Muslims.

Finally, to call "Palestinian" nationalism equivalent to Jewish nationalism is to show a deep and profound disrespect not only for history, but for one's own people. The Jewish people have lived on that land for something over 3,500 years. We are, in fact, the closest thing to an indigenous people that that land has... unless there is some misplaced tribe of Jebusites wandering around somewhere who have eluded notice.

"Palestinian" nationalism, on the other hand, was born a quarter past last Tuesday and represents an entirely aggressive response to Jewish national reconstitution. These are hardly "equivalent" nationalisms and I do not see where the Jewish people are under any obligation (moral, legal, or otherwise) to recognize a people who only recently constituted themselves as a people for the sole purpose of opposing the creation and maintenance of our small home.

In the mean time, I cannot even book a room at the Mecca Hilton.

That is quite some beautiful building, wouldn't you say?

The Elder recommended that I give it a shot and I thought, "why not?" So I called the Hilton Corporation and, indeed, I failed in this modest endeavor. I tried twice, in fact, and both times I ultimately found myself listening to muzak.

I also called the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles a couple of times, but they were even less helpful than the Hilton staff.

At one point one of the clerks from Hilton said, "We don't want to exclude anyone," yet, another, perhaps more honest clerk, told me straight-up, "Non-Muslims cannot enter the Holy City of Mecca."

Ya don't say?
And, yet, the left constantly excoriates ~~the Jews~~ Israel on issues of universal human rights.

It is entirely unjust,

Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.

Ahmed Qurei, member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, says that Jews who peacefully visit the Temple Mount are guilty of "religious aggression."

The story is published in at least 15 Arabic media outlets.

Qurei charged that the Jews who regularly stroll around the holiest site in Judaism "provoke the feelings of Muslims worshipers by deliberately drinking wine," which is of course a complete fabrication.

He is also upset that there are signs in the area pointing visitors to the Kotel HaKatan, or "Little Wall", a tiny area a bit north of the Western Wall plaza, saying that giving it this "Biblical" name is another form of Judaizing.

He called for "Arab and Islamic nations to intervene" to save Jerusalem from those Jews.

Last week I posted this video - from a Muslim site - where you can plainly see who is guilty of "religious aggression."

See also this from April, where Muslims were terrorizing little Jewish kids visiting the site.

Meanwhile, Ma'an "reports:"

The Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron will be closed to Muslim worshipers on Thursday and Friday, an official at the mosque told Ma'an Sunday.

Hijazi Abu Sneina told Ma'an the mosque would be open to Israeli settlers during the two days of Rosh Hashanah, or Jewish New Year, but closed to Muslims.

What they fail to mention is that this happens every year. For about ten days the site is closed to Muslims, for another ten days it is closed to Jews. The implication from this and similar articles in the Arab press is that Israel is arbitrarily closing the site to Muslims without warning, but this is part of a signed agreement.

For some reason, Palestinian Muslim intolerance of religious freedom is another of those things that is just not considered newsworthy.

PLO ambassador: Israeli Jews return to "their countries of origin," we're hoping to shoot 100 ton warheads

From MEMRI:

Following are excerpts from an interview with Palestinian Ambassador to Iran Salah Al-Zawawi, which aired on Kawthar TV on September 16, 2014:

Salah Al-Zawawi: [Khamenei] is a big-hearted and broad-minded man of innovative wisdom. He is the successor of the great man, Imam Khomeini, who wished to visit Jerusalem and pray at the Al-Aqsa Mosque. I hoped that his wish could have been fulfilled, and that he could have prayed at the liberated Al-Aqsa Mosque.

I wished we would see the black banners of Khorasan on the move towards Jerusalem, as foretold by our Prophet Muhammad, and that we would live to celebrate the victory just as we suffered tragedies throughout our long history. Then we would witness our great people's return to their homeland, the land of their forefathers, and we would see the demise and the shattering of this alien entity. Nothing bonds them together, no chemistry. Only physics are at work in occupied Palestine. All those people who have gathered to occupy our land must return to their countries of origin, leaving behind only the Palestinian Jews, with whom we had lived in love, respect, and fraternity.

[...]
I would like to reiterate my gratitude to the Islamic Republic of Iran for the training, financing, and weapons it has provided us, as well as for its political and diplomatic positions regarding Palestine. Iran has helped us to attain our great victory.

[…]
I am not saying that Palestine will be liberated tomorrow, but we have made real strides on the path to liberation. A missile with a 200 kilogram warhead will carry a warhead of 100 tons in the future, because weapons change as men change. We just need to cross the scientific threshold to get to our goal.

But I thought that the PLO accepted Israel's right to exist and that they no longer support military attacks against Israel!

Must be a bunch of slips of the tongue. This will no doubt cause a big scandal within the Palestinian diplomatic ranks and their media will denounce Mr. Zawawi's anti-peace statements. Of course. Any minute now. Because they really want peace. They say it all the time in English. So it must be true. Let's just ignore things like this.

Egyptian jihadists behead an "Israeli spy," Egyptian forces kill a Gazan. Ho-hum.

From Ma'an:

A 35-year-old Bedouin man has been beheaded in southern Sheikh Zuweid city in Egypt for allegedly collaborating with the Israeli intelligence.

Egyptian officials said Friday that the head of the unidentified man was found near his body on Friday morning, two weeks after he was seized by the Ansar Bait al-Maqdis militant group for interrogation.

Sinai jihadists are beheading people - and no one is really talking about it.

Also from Ma'an:

Egyptian border police shot dead a Palestinian and detained two others after they exited the opening of a smuggling tunnel in the border town of Rafah on Saturday morning, Egyptian military sources said.

Border guard officers reportedly spotted three men walking out of a tunnel opening in area of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier area on the Egyptian side of Rafah, a town that straddles the border.

The sources said that officers shouted at the men to stop, but the men instead attempted to return into the tunnel.

As a result, officers opened fire, killing one. The other two men then stopped and were taken into custody.

The sources told Ma'an that the operation came after the Egyptian army announced a state of alert along the border with the Gaza Strip following intelligence information regarding the potential "infiltration" of "gunmen" from the Gaza Strip into Sinai Peninsula.

Egypt kills Gazans - and no one is talking about that either.

Fake Gaza "civilian" of the Day - plus photo of Gaza boys pretending to execute a girl (update)

On July 21, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights said that Alaa’ Jamal Barda, 35, killed by an IDF strike, was a civilian (they named all the members of armed groups they counted.)

Here he is, in a poster with the Hamas Al Qassam Brigades logo:

I also found these two photographs. The first one was shared on Twitter and Facebook as an example of how Gaza children have hope, as a boy pretending to be a militant gives a girl some flowers:

The second one, with the same girl, is a bit more disturbing:

Maybe she spurned the flowers, so she deserved it for dishonoring the boy.

UPDATE: No martyr poster, but Islamic Jihad describes Mohammed al-Najjar as a "mujahid" who was killed on his way to dawn prayers July 25. PCHR seems to identify him as a civilian.

Other members of the al-Najjar family were killed the same day but at their house, and we already showed that at least one - and maybe more, based on their burial shrouds - were terrorists (h/t Bob K)

09/20 Links: Israeli Tactics Greatly Reduced Civilian Casualties; How to defeat ISIS? Ask Israel

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: If the West denies what it’s up against, it will lose

Westerners cannot grasp the nature of religious fanaticism. They can’t believe that other cultures may be unlike themselves and motivated not by reason but by dogma. They cannot take seriously the notion of a holy war.
But Islamic State is the purest expression we have seen of precisely that, because all the usual alibis have been stripped away. The fundamental goal of Islamic State is not to remedy some geopolitical grievance against Israel, America, India or Saudi Arabia. It is to establish a caliphate and force the world to submit to Islam. What Islamic State openly stands for is mass murder and barbarism in the name of God.
Neither air strikes nor ground troops will defeat the religious idea for which Islamic State stands and which is inspiring thousands of Muslims to join it and other such militias. To defeat Islamic terror, that idea has to be defeated. The free world needs to help truly reformist Muslims to purge it from their religion.
We must hope Islam can be reformed. If not, the alternative is brutal: either we defeat Islamic extremism or it defeats us. But for sure, denying what it is will hand it victory.

Gaza: The Proto-Palestinian State – That Wasn’t

The Arab and Palestinian leadership, with the UN’s help, was brilliant in ensuring that the world would never forget Palestinian refugee story and, indeed, it is as fresh today as it was in 1948.
A 1959 news report, gleaned from the New York Times archive, provides a revealing illustration of this cynical public relations stunt, which was as destructive as it was effective.
That year, then UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold proposed a massive international development project to resettle Palestinian refugees. As the Times reported on August 9, 1959, Mr. Hammarskjold suggested that $1.5 – $2 billion (approximately $11-$15 billion in 2014 dollars) be spent over the next five years to “make productive jobs for the 1,000,000 refugees in Arab lands.”
It was not to be. The Arab League, supported by Palestinian refugee leaders, opposed the UN plan. They not only rejected the development concept, they demanded that UNRWA “drop all of its resettlement operations and become exclusively a relief agency.” Echoing exactly what we hear from today’s Palestinian leadership, the Arabs insisted that refugees be permitted to return to homes in Israel or receive compensation if they chose not to.
The Times story left no doubt as to what motivated the Arabs’ position:

Israeli Tactics Greatly Reduced Gaza Civilian Casualty Rates

Israel's detractors engage in moral inversion, falsely accusing Israel of crimes and sins that the enemies of the Jewish state commit. In the recently concluded summer war of 2014 between Israel and Hamas, the usual clique of UN organizations, human rights groups and media organizations accused Israel of recklessly causing disproportionate civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip, while paying less attention to Hamas crimes against both Israeli and Palestinian civilians. Groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch demanded investigations of Israel for war crimes and called for embargos against the Jewish state. But a web site that specializes in military analysis, DefenseNews, describes innovative Israeli tactics that significantly reduce civilian casualties. The article quotes Israeli Brig. Gen. Amikam Norkin, Israel Air Force chief of staff, who explained that

Protective Edge marked the first time fixed-wing fighters were used as dedicated assets to division- and brigade-level forces.
“Over the last year, we drilled in a very substantive way with the ground forces and we built a process where our fighters could attack at much closer distances … We did this hundreds of times during the operation.”
The result according to Norkin was that Israel was able to far surpass

"an international average of five innocents killed for each targeted terrorist. He said preliminary data from Protective Edge indicates “we’re slowly closing in on numbers of one to one."

Is the UN Fair to Israel?

Israel is a vibrant democracy with full rights for women and gays, a free press and independent judiciary. You would think that the United Nations would celebrate such a country. Instead, the UN condemns Israel at every turn to the point of obsession. How did this happen? Anne Bayefsky, director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights, explains in five eye-opening minutes.

09/19 Links Pt2: Former AP Reporter Confirms Matti Friedman's Account; Israeli hackers ‘scary talented’

From Ian:

Former AP Reporter Confirms Matti Friedman Account

Last month, former Associated Press reporter Matti Friedman published an essay in Tablet highlighting how, and why, news organizations get Israel so wrong. The AP’s Jerusalem bureau, where Friedman used to work, was the subject of much of his criticism. He argued that the bureau stuck to a preexisting narrative of Israeli extremism and Palestinian moderation. One of his examples that his former employer stifled stories that presented a divergent narrative came from 2009, when two of his colleagues had a story about a peace proposal from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that Palestinian leadership rejected. Both the Israelis and Palestinians confirmed this, but editors pulled the piece.
Steven Gutkin, the former AP bureau chief in Jerusalem, who hired Friedman in 2006, wrote a response in which he denied the charge that the story was pulled due to editorial bias, asserting that the information discovered by the reporters, namely a map depicting a proposed land swap, was old news. (Friedman addressed Gutkin’s response here on the Scroll last week. Gutkin has since published a rebuttal.)
Now, Mark Lavie, a former colleague of Friedman’s at the AP in Jerusalem and the author of Broken Spring, has weighed in, identifying himself as one of the reporters involved in writing about the 2009 peace offer blog post directed to Gutkin. He confirms Friedman’s account of the story being pulled.

Awaiting the verdict

If former prime minister Ehud Olmert’s Holyland trial was the Israeli corruption trial of the century, the Arab Bank trial that has been taking place in a federal court in Brooklyn for the last five weeks could be the terrorism finance trial of the century.
The trial has a master villain, Hamas, which carried out the August 2001 Sbarro suicide bombing in Jerusalem, killing or wounding 130, and a range of horrid terrorist attacks during the second intifada.
There are the victims, 297 plaintiffs who were wounded or are family members of those murdered in the 24 terrorist attacks from 1998-2004 financed via Saudi Arabia and Hezbollah’s al-Shahid Foundation, using the Jordanian bank as a conduit.
Also, there is a 10-year history of intense legal battles, including trying to get the bank’s “secret” client documents located in Jordan, Lebanon and the Palestinian areas.

Military Occupation To Continue

Scotland rejects the two state solution. Backed by the nuclear armed British army, navy and air force, the once sovereign state of Scotland is to continue as just another large neighbourhood of the United Kingdom.
Israel has so many great friends amongst the Scottish people (we assume) because the ones who make the most noise don’t seem to like the prospect of an independent homeland for the Jews remaining here.
Lets hope that Yvonne Ridley’s dream of a “Zionist free zone” in Scotland is now sunk too.

Hagee: Israel is not an 'occupier' but the owner of the land

One picture captured my heart this past Sunday. The sight of Pastor John Hagee, the leader of tens of millions of evangelicals in the United States and around the world, and Rabbi Aryeh Scheinberg, a great scholar and veteran rabbi of the Orthodox community in San Antonio, embracing during a joint prayer at the Western Wall.
This picture joins the mounting evidence of a theological earthquake occurring in parts of the Christian world pertaining to relations with the Jewish people and the State of Israel. While some of us have difficulty opening up to these changes, considering the bloody historical account of the Jewish people with the church, it is important to know of this revolution and the righteous among the nations who come to our assistance.
In 2006, Hagee established Christians United for Israel (CUFI), a growing organization that currently numbers 1.8 million members. The group's activists regularly approach their representatives in the U.S. government in Washington on behalf of Israel. The organization has branches on many campuses in the fight for the hearts of the next generation, and starting this year will launch a program bringing Christian student missions to Israel to become directly acquainted with it.
CUFI convenes a huge annual conference in Washington and throughout the year holds dinners honoring Israel in every major city. Hagee emphasizes that they condition admission to the organization and its meetings with the stipulation that "they are not to be conversionary in any way, but are to communicate to our Jewish brothers and sisters our love for them and our desire to help them in any way that we can."

As I look at the stories I covered this week, I always ask myself whether - in a normal universe - the news stories I report would be considered newsworthy to the mainstream media.

So, let's play the game:

When the highly-paid leader of one of the world's major human rights organizations tweets hundreds of times about a war, and yet manages to ignore most of the human rights violations being done by one side - Is That Newsworthy?

How about when the side whose violations he all-but ignores is a terrorist group?
How about when he insists that he is even-handed?
How about when he snidely dismisses his critics instead of honestly responding to well-documented criticism?

When the world media parrots reports that the Gaza power plant was "destroyed" and will not be repaired for a year, and yet it is back in operation two months later - Is That Newsworthy?
When the world's biggest NGOs, as well as the UN, explicitly reject the use of standards that would ensure that their fact-finding missions aren't biased - Is That Newsworthy?
When a purportedly pro-American Muslim parade is held in New York, but it includes insults against America as well as realistic replicas of guns and a representation of a lynching - Is That Newsworthy?
When terror groups who were quoted as credible during a war brag immediately afterwards about how they manipulate the media - Is That Newsworthy?
When there are reports that a de-facto government is stealing aid meant for their people, and extorts money from people who want to leave - Is That Newsworthy?
When a UN agency goes out of its way to traumatize hundreds of thousands of children in order to incite them to hate - Is That Newsworthy?

How about when their spokesperson talks about a child who lost his father without mentioning that his father was a terrorist, meeting with other terrorists in military center that disguised as a mosque?

When newspapers worldwide reported about a person who saved Jews from Nazis criticizing Israel for killing his innocent relatives, but don't do basic research to find out that there were at least two terrorists in the house - including one of his relatives - Is That Newsworthy?
When a former MP of a Western-friendly government goes on a TV show run by a terrorist organization and says that Jews kill Muslims and Christians for Passover matzoh - Is That Newsworthy?
When it is proven that the statistics on civilians killed in Gaza were not only wrong, but were obviously manipulated by human rights NGOs in Gaza to inflate the number of "civilians" killed, causing every single news organization to report the war completely wrong - Is That Newsworthy?
When the leader of the Palestinian Arabs praises a woman terrorist who bragged about hiding bombs in watermelons at a circus to kill as many Jewish children as possible - Is That Newsworthy?

What about if he was an actor or an athlete - would that make it newsworthy then?

Hey - I'm not a professional news reporter or editor or publisher. Maybe I'm missing something, and for some reason these stories don't reach the threshold of newsworthiness.

I would really, really love to have a media professional explain to me exactly why, though.

Felesteen, a Hamas newspaper, has an op-ed by Prof. Naim Al-Safadi.

Safadi is a "professor of hadith" at Islamic University of Gaza.

His article, entitled "Jews only understand the language of force," uses Koranic "proofs" for how Jews think.

After the usual praises for Allah and confirming the supposed Hamas "victory" he says "The Muslim religion and the methods of the beloved Muhammad peace be upon him teaches the mechanism to deal with the Jews so we can achieve victory after victory."

As he narrates, the Jews of Medina spurned the generous offer of Mohammed to have them convert to Islam, or else they would be killed. The obstinate Jews declined this generous offer and they instead chose to resist, proving their hatred. (Those Jews who didn't convert were eventually beheaded, in Allah's mercy.)

After giving another example of similar Jewish recalcitrance to do the reasonable thing, Safadi says that clearly negotiating with Jews today will not result in the desired end result that he describes in the beginning: "the liberation of Palestine, all of Palestine."

Can you imagine the nerve of those Jews for not surrendering meekly to crazed Islamists?

He's not being antisemitic - he's just describing the character of the Jews as seen in the Koran. It is very scientific!

09/19 Links Pt1:The TBS of the TSS, A chronicle of irrational fanaticism; Hamas's Violations of Int'l Law

From Ian:

The TBS of the TSS - A chronicle of irrational fanaticism

Time to remove kid-gloves
The aftermath of Operation Protective Edge leaves little room for niceties in the conduct of the public debate on Israel’s security and on the measures it should adopt to preserve its security. This is no time to call a spade as a manually operated device whose principle function is to create elevation differentials in the surface of the Earth.
We can no longer afford to recoil from the unpleasant necessity of calling a spade a spade.
The recent – and likely-to be-repeated – round of fighting in Gaza should have driven home to anyone with a smidgen of common sense and common decency that conceding territory to Arab control is both futile and fatal.
The revelations of the terrorist capabilities developed in the wake of the 2005 abandonment of Gaza – in terms of overhead missiles and underground tunnels – underscored just how dangerous, detrimental and dysfunctional it is to exchange Jewish land for some wisp of hope of peace with the Arabs. The truth is so glaringly apparent that this nefarious, nonsensical notion can no longer be excused or condoned by assuming well-intentioned naiveté.
It is imperative, therefore, to conduct an open public debate – however heated and blunt, even brutal – about the motives of obdurate adherents of this disproved dogma and the reasons for them clinging so doggedly to it.

Sarah Honig: Hey diddle, Fatah and the fiddle

In her authoritative clipped cadences, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni admonishes those of us who refuse to sweeten Ramallah figurehead Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah cohorts with “daring initiatives.” She sternly disapproves of Israelis who “are not willing to pay the price of a diplomatic arrangement.”
We might of course nitpick and wonder whether a diplomatic arrangement is in fact attainable. And if so, we might further press and inquire why such arrangement hadn’t already been attained.
We might point out that the moderation Livni ascribes to Abbas connotes goodwill and that a minimal supply thereof should have facilitated some arrangement long ago – long before the advent on our scene of Hamas’s religious bad-guys. Secular enemies, as per Livni’s idiosyncratic political lexicon, aren’t quite enemies – certainly not extremists or terrorists.
So why then the absence of peace? Are we to understand that she pins the blame on Israel’s supposed small-minded stinginess? *We could ask in what gospel it’s written that diplomatic arrangements (which are hardly irrevocable) must be purchased with hard territorial and strategic currency (which cannot thereafter be recovered). But since in her world Livni writes the rules, this question is unlikely to be answered.

Released: The "Official" List of Hamas Violations of Int'l Law

In advance of the UN Human Rights Council investigation of Israeli "war crimes" in Gaza this summer, the Lawfare Project has compiled a detailed list of "Hamas's Violations of International Law."
The New York-based Lawfare Project attempts to safeguard against the abuse of the law as a weapon of war. It turned its attentions this month to ensuring that international law is not turned against Israel, in the face of Hamas indiscriminate rocket and tunnel attacks against Israel.
It is well-known that Hamas used, in various ways, its civilian population as shields in the face of Israeli missile attacks, while firing rockets at Israeli population centers and tunneling into Israel for the purpose of facilitating terrorist attacks. However, the exact international laws that Hamas has violated are not widely understood, and the Lawfare Project has prepared an 11-page document to fill in this gap.
The document lists the specific rule violated by Hamas, and provides documentation of the violations. For instance, Rule 1 of Customary International Humanitarian Law is the Principle of Distinction between Civilians and Combatants. The Lawfare Project notes that the U.S. State Department has condemned Hamas rocket fire on Israeli civilians, and Hamas itself declared that all Israelis had become targets for its missile attacks.
Hamas has admitted violating the rule requiring advance warning of attacks, and the UN Relief and Works Agency said it found rockets hidden by Hamas in a school – in violation of Rule 22 (Precautions Against the Effects of Attacks).
The full Lawfare Project report can be seen here.

Caroline Glick: Why Rouhani loves NY

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s trip to New York next week will be a welcome relief for the Iranian leader. Finally, he’ll be somewhere where he’s appreciated, even loved.
Ahead of his trip to America, the US media continued its practice of presenting Rouhani as a moderate, and a natural ally for the US. NBC News’ Anne Curry interviewed Rouhani in Tehran, focusing her attention on his dim view of Islamic State.
Rouhani told Curry, “From the viewpoint of the Islamic tenets and culture, killing an innocent people equals the killing of the whole humanity. And therefore, the killing and beheading of innocent people in fact is a matter of shame for them and it’s the matter of concern and sorrow for all the human and all the mankind.”
The US media and political establishment’s willingness to take Rouhani at his word when he says that he’s a moderate is one of the reasons that Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz was in such a desolate mood on Wednesday.
One of Steinitz’s chief concerns was the US’s insistence that Rouhani is a moderate.
In his words, “The only thing that has changed [since Rouhani replaced president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] is the tone. The only difference is that the world was unwilling to hear from Ahmadinejad and [his nuclear negotiator Saeed] Jalili, what it is willing to listen to from Rouhani and [Iranian Foreign Minister Javad] Zarif.”

Gazans reveal Hamas war crimes

Mudar Zahran at Gatestone Institute interviewed Gazans over the phone and Skype to find out what they really thought of Hamas.

The interviewees tend to be more Fatah leaning, and some of their stories seem a little exaggerated (like Hamas beheading a political opponent,) but the main thrust of what happened in Gaza shows that Hamas actions, directly or indirectly, caused many Gazans to die - and lots of Gazans are very angry.

Here are some of the interviews:

S. a medical worker, said:

"The Israeli army sends warnings to people [Gazans] to evacuate buildings before an attack. The Israelis either call or send a text message. Sometimes they call several times to make sure everyone has been evacuated. Hamas's strict policy, though, was not to allow us to evacuate. Many people got killed, locked inside their homes by Hamas militants. Hamas's official Al-Quds TV regularly issued warnings to Gazans not to evacuate their homes. Hamas militants would block the exits to the places residents were asked to evacuate. In the Shijaiya area, people received warnings from the Israelis and tried to evacuate the area, but Hamas militants blocked the exits and ordered people to return to their homes. Some of the people had no choice but to run towards the Israelis and ask for protection for their families. Hamas shot some of those people as they were running; the rest were forced to return to their homes and get bombed. This is how the Shijaiya massacre happened. More than 100 people were killed."

K, another graduate student at an Egyptian university who had gone to Gaza to see his family but was unable to leave after the war started, said on July 22:

"When people stopped listening to Hamas orders not to evacuate and began leaving their homes anyway, Hamas imposed a curfew: anyone walking out in the street was shot without being asked any questions. That way Hamas made sure people had to stay in their homes even if they were about to get bombed. God will ask Hamas on judgment day for those killers' blood."

S., a Gazan businessman, said:

"The cease-fire Hamas agreed to carried the same conditions the Egyptians and the Israelis offered during the second week of the war -- after only 160 Gazans had been killed. Why did Hamas have to wait until 2,200 were killed, and then accept the very same offer? Hamas has blackmailed the world with the killed Gazan civilians to make itself look like a freedom fighter against an evil Israel. Hamas showed Gazans that it could not care less for their blood and their children. And why should Hamas care? Its leaders are either in mansions in Qatar or villas in Jordan. Mashaal [Khaled Mashaal, the head of Hamas] is in Qatar, Mohammad Nazzal is in Jordan and Abu Marzouk is in Cairo: why should they want a ceasefire? Everyone here in Gaza is wondering why Hamas rejected so many ceasefires. Hamas knows it will not defeat Israel's army, so why did it continue fighting? The answer is simple: Hamas wanted us butchered so it could win the media war against Israel by showing our dead children on TV and then get money from Qatar."

I asked S. if other Gazans shared his view. He said,

"Gazans are not stupid. We are now telling Hamas: Either you bring victory and liberate Palestine as you claim, or simply leave Gaza and maybe give it back to the Palestinian Authority or even Israel -- or even Egypt! We have had enough of Hamas's hallucinations and promises that never come true."

A first-aid volunteer, E., said that Hamas militants had confiscated 150 truckloads of humanitarian supplies the day before. He said the supplies were donated by charities in the West Bank and that their delivery was facilitated by the IDF. He commented: "This theft angers all of us [Gazans]. The Israeli army allows supplies to come in, and Hamas steals them. It seems even the Israelis care for us more than Hamas."

Another aid worker, A., confirmed that Hamas steals the humanitarian supplies given to Gaza. "They [Hamas] take most of it, sell it to us, and just give us the stuff they do not want."

A Gazan mosque's imam said that the most precious aid item Hamas stole was water. "Gazans are thirsty and Hamas is stealing the water bottles provided to us for free and selling them at 20 Israeli shekels [approximately $5] for the big bottle and 10 Israeli shekels for the small one."

Read the whole thing.

(h/t many people)

This week, female terrorist Zakiya Shammout died in Algeria after an illness.

She was involved in multiple terror attacks in the 1960s and early 1970s, before being arrested in 1971. As JTA wrote then:

Forty suspected terrorists, including the pregnant wife of the alleged ringleader, Mohammed Shamout, were arrested today. Detention warrants have been issued for 19 of them by a Nazareth magistrate. The gang is believed responsible for various acts of sabotage during the past two years, the most recent being an explosion that destroyed a bus in Haifa last week.

Mrs. Zakiya Shamout, 25, who is the mother of four children and is seven months pregnant with her fifth, is suspected of sabotage in the Afuleh market place in October, 1969 when an explosion killed one man and Injured 25 persons. She is also suspected of having planted explosives in watermelons at the Haifa circus in 1969. The explosives failed to go off. Other members of the Shamout family are among those arrested.

Here is the account of how Shamout intended to kill children at the circus in 1969:

A 14-year-old Israeli boy’s curiosity was credited by police today with frustrating saboteurs’ plans for a major blast in a circus here which was timed to maim and kill hundreds of the circus-goers.

Benjamin Peretz and a youthful friend had been looking at the Tokyo Fair from the street but apparently did not intend to watch the performance. They wandered over to one of the numerous watermelon stands looking for “spare” melons. Benjamin opened a melon and observed a pencil-like object embedded in the opening. He removed it and playfully threw it at his friend. It exploded, injuring the boy slightly.

Police were called to the melon stand and began a search. They found the suspected melon and inside of it a kilogram of explosives. A second melon was found with three times that much explosive. An old coat, to which no one had paid any attention, was found to have 20 sticks of gelignite sewn into its lining. The circus performance was halted immediately and the audience followed instructions to leave by the tent through its back entrance while the search for more explosives continued. No more were found.

The police said that the pencil-like object was a timing device which had been set to detonate the explosives as the circus audience was leaving the performance. They said a major catastrophe in damages, injuries and death could have occurred.

I don't know how many deaths she ended up being responsible for. Arabic sites are saying that she was sentenced to 12 99-year sentences but was released in 1985 in a prisoner swap. However, Israel would not allow her to stay in the country and the only Arab country that was willing to take her was Algeria.

Her terror career is being exaggerated in her obituaries, but her happiness at targeting Jewish civilians is clear. She claimed that the watermelon bomb at the circus exploded and killed many Israelis and described how happy she was, dancing around with her husband and chanting Allah Akbar.

Shammout also described how she chose to attack the market, waiting until there were no Arabs there and supposedly putting four bomb-laden baskets covered with fruit on different locations, while pretending to shop with her children.

The official PA news agency reports that Mahmoud Abbas sent condolences to her family, praising the terrorist who targeted Jewish children at a circus as a pioneer in the "struggle" who was "dedicated to the service of her country and committed to its objectives."\

Yes, its objectives of killing Jews.

As usual, none of the "human rights activists" who support the Palestinian Arab cause are the least bit bothered by the "moderate" Mahmoud Abbas praising a cold blooded murderer who literally targeted children.

(h/t Joshua Fox)