November 2007 ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Friday, November 30, 2007

It's great knowing that Nablus is secure

The centerpiece of the Palestinian Authority's facade of bringing law and order to the West Bank was it's much heralded crackdown on crime in Nablus. A measure of how successful it was came two weeks ago:US consul general Jacob Wallace on Wednesday praised the Palestinians for restoring security to the streets of Nablus, and announced a 1.3-million-dollar aid package to the...

Friday links

The Volokh Conspiracy has a magazine-length article about the history of UNRWA. (h/t Soccer Dad)Jewish Current Issues on Sharansky and Annapolis (h/t Atlas)Meryl Yourish on Hamas and PA's intentions towards IsraelAthens, Jerusalem and Auschwitz at Commentary (h/t Daled Amo...

From BBC:Thousands of people have marched in the Sudanese capital Khartoum to call for UK teacher Gillian Gibbons to be shot.Mrs Gibbons, 54, from Liverpool, was jailed by a court on Thursday after children in her class named a teddy bear Muhammad.She was sentenced to 15 days for insulting religion, and she will then be deported.The Foreign Office was in contact with Sudan's...

"Land without a people for a people without a land"

One of early Zionism's slogans that took hold of the imagination of the proponents of a Jewish state was "A land without a people for a people without a land." Coined by Israel Zangwill, it evoked a desolate, empty desert where the industrious Jews could build a modern state.Israel-bashers are fond of using this quote as proof of early Zionist mendacity, ignoring the 400,000 Arabs that lived in Palestine at the beginning of modern Zionism. To an...

Dan the Man

Aussie Dave at Israellycool, where I guest-blog, has dug up the transcript and video (starting at 1:35) of Dan Gillerman's speech to the UN yesterday on the occasion of the Annual Day of Solidarity for the Haters of Jewish Nationalism. (It certainly isn't a day of solidarity with Palestinian Arabs because none of the nations celebrating have any interest in allowing Palestinian Arabs the right to become full citizens of any other nation.)Here's...

November 30, 1947: The first post-Partition massacre

In the weeks leading up to the UN Partition vote, the Arabs of Palestine were on their best behavior. There were very few terror attacks against Jews in November, and the last major attack I could find was in late August.But immediately after they lost the partition vote, it was like the pent-up hatred all exploded at once.The first victims were on a bus to Jerusalem. Some...

Gaza Hajj update

As I have previously blogged, the PA and Israel arranged for thousands of Gaza Hajj pilgrims to travel in buses through Israel to the West Bank where they will go on to perform Hajj in the apartheid-like Muslim-only city of Mecca. Hamas seems to be blocking the pilgrims, saying that they will open the Rafah crossing to Egypt and have the pilgrims go that way, so Israel wouldn't be involved.The only problem is, Egypt does not open the Rafah crossings...

From AP:British teacher Gillian Gibbons was convicted of insulting Islam for letting her pupils name a teddy bear Muhammad and sentenced to 15 days in prison and deportation from Sudan, one of her defense lawyers said Thursday.Ali Mohammed Ajab, of Gibbons' defense team, said she was found guilty of "insulting the faith of Muslims in Sudan" under Article 125 of the Sudanese...

Olmert learning lying lessons from Arafat

The Jersualem Post reported:Israel's sovereignty over the Temple Mount is not up for discussion, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Wednesday, a day after Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said a Palestinian capital in east Jerusalem was key to an agreement with Israel.What occurred in Annapolis and Washington over the last two days had no bearing on the situation on the Temple Mount, Olmert said. But today a Palestinian Arab negotiator...

It is not an exaggeration to say that the world was riveted by the events in New York State in November of 1947.On November 25, after two months of negotiations, the Ad-Hoc Committee of the UN in Lake Success voted to put Partition before the General Assembly by a vote of 25-13, with 17 abstentions. While only a simple majority was needed for its motion, a two-thirds majority...

Treppenwitz hits another home run

One of the best writers in the JBlogopshere has another stellar post.Read i...

Erekat tells a good joke. Really!

There was a post-Annapolis meeting at the Brookings Institution today, and Saeb Erekat, one of the speakers, made a pretty good joke. Paraphrased from the Foreign Policy blog: An Israeli and a Palestinian are watching a Western. In the movie, a cowboy is riding bareback on a particularly wild horse. The Israeli says to the Palestinian, "I'll bet you 10 shekels he falls." The Palestinian replies immediately, "I'll bet you he doesn't." The cowboy...

Iranian blogger in the doghouse

From Radio Free Europe: November 28, 2007 (RFE/RL) -- Iranian authorities have detained a blogger after he published details about the reported use of bomb-sniffing dogs in President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's security detail.The Persian-language website gooya.com says Reza Valizadeh was the object of a complaint from the president's office. He was detained on November 26, but his whereabouts are unknown. Iran's judiciary has neither confirmed nor denied...

Yet more on Gaza's "humanitarian crisis"

WAFA, the official PA "news" agency, says: Agriculture Ministry declared Wednesday that the efforts, were exerted to export the strawberry and flowers of Gaza Strip to Arab and European countries, succeeded despite the Israeli siege imposed.Succeeded "despite" the siege? The ministry said in its statement that “such a success in exporting flowers and strawberry came as a result of Premier Salam Fayyad and Agriculture Minister Mahmoud al-Habbash’s...

More Gaza Hajj news

Palestine Press Agency and Ma'an, both in Arabic, report that Israel will allow some 2400 Gazan pilgrims to cross the Erez crossing early next month, take buses to the West Bank and then travel on to Mecca for Hajj.Hamas disagrees, saying that the pilgrims will go through Rafah to Egypt and then go on to Mecca from there. Hamas does not want any Gazans to leave Gaza through Israel because that implies that Hamas is not in control of the Gaza borders.So...

Arab roadmap logic

Palestine Today (Arabic) quotes AFP (I cannot find the AFP article, auto-translate cleaned up a bit):An Arab official who participated in the Annapolis conference yesterday told Agence France Presse that the Arab participants at the meeting "were all disappointed," after the announcement by President George Bush of "common understanding" reached between the Palestinians and Israelis to launch negotiations on the final settlement of the Palestinian...

Saudi ambassador tells a whopper of a lie

From JTA (and also PalPress):Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States rejected recognizing Israel as a Jewish state. "There are 1.5 million civilians in Israel who do not define themselves as Jewish," Adel al-Jubeir told reporters at the U.S.-convened Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in Annapolis, Md."We do not believe states should define themselves according to religion or ethnicity."...said the representative of a nation whose official religion...

The Olmert/Abbas joint statement

From the NYT:“The representatives of the government of the state of Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, represented respectively by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President Mahmoud Abbas, in his capacity as chairman of the P.L.O. Executive Committee [1] and president of the Palestinian Authority, have convened in Annapolis, Maryland, under the auspices of President...

Another player in the PalArab extremist sweepstakes

The terrorist organization Hizb ut-Tahrir held an anti-Annapolis rally in Hebron as well as in Nablus, totaling thousands of people.We don't hear much about Hizb ut-Tahrir in the PalArab territories, but they are a worldwide extremist Muslim organization dedicated to creating a single Islamic state based on Islamic law. (They are also more than a little anti-semitic.) This means that Palestinian Arab statehood is not their goal at all - they make...

I saw this picture on the webpage of the Jerusalem Summit, showing how vulnerable Tel Aviv and the entire Dan region would be if Israel abandoned Jewish communities in the West Bank. (Click on the picture to enlarge.)To be fair, it was taken with a telephoto lens. In fact, Tel Aviv is a whopping 10 miles away from Peduel - easily within rocket range.Luckily, Wikipedia has...

Ehud Barak, 2002

After the failure of Camp David and the resultant intifada, Ehud Barak spoke about what went wrong:Barak today portrays Arafat's behavior at Camp David as a "performance" geared to exacting from the Israelis as many concessions as possible without ever seriously intending to reach a peace settlement or sign an "end to the conflict." "He did not negotiate in good faith, indeed, he did not negotiate at all. He just kept saying 'no' to every offer,...

How to distinguish Islamist from non-Islamist schools

Progressive Muslim M. Zuhdi Jasser writes an article in Family Security Matters about the danger of Islamist schools in the United States, and he includes this guide to tell an Islamist school from a non-Islamist school:1. How does the school teach American history and the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights? What is taught about the struggle of our founding fathers against theocracy? Is European Enlightenment ideology taught? Are students...

Palestine Today has an interview with the former Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Irema Sabri, where he says (autotranslated, somewhat cleaned up):"[There are] key items, the first item that the right of return is a legitimate sacred right, that children inherit from our fathers and grandchildren inherit from their children, if a person died and the heirs claimed this inheritance,...

Some Annapolis reading

History News Network: The Annapolis Conference: A Chance to Right an Historical Wrong?- Decent overview if an overly sunny conclusionShrinkwrapped: Peace will come- Some relevant observations from my favorite online shrink.Bernard Lewis, On the Jewish Question- Always nice when a real scholar stands up and tells the truth.Soccer Dad: Sieg-speak- Fisking Henry Seigman is easy but Soccer Dad goes above and beyond. The fact that he links to two of my...

Today's Sharia news: A teddy bear named Mohammed

From the Times (UK):A British primary school teacher arrested in Sudan faces up to 40 lashes for blasphemy after letting her class of 7-year-olds name a teddy bear Muhammad.Gillian Gibbons, 54, from Liverpool, was arrested at her lodgings at Khartoum's Unity High School yesterday, accused of insulting the Prophet of Islam.Her colleagues said that they feared for her safety after reports that groups of young men had gathered outside the Khartoum police...

Saudi Arabia frees 1500 al-Qaeda prisoners after they "repent"

See the power of repentance? It gets you out of jail!Saudi authorities have released more than 1,500 reformed extremists, who were detained on charges of embracing and spreading takfeer (the ideology that brands other Muslims who disagree with them as infidels).The extremists, under the guidance of the Ministry of Interior, had undergone lengthy counseling, according to Muhammad Al-Nujaimi, a member of the Counseling Committee and professor of comparative...

Hamas rocket manufacturer dead

It's been over a week since the last reported PalArab death at the hands of PalArabs, but the streak has ended. Hamas has announced that one of their engineers dedicated to building terror rockets has died from injuries inflicted a few weeks ago, and they did not blame Israel, so it sounds like a work accident or a Fatah bomb.His name is autotranslated as "Abdel Hadi Abu forehead".Our count of Palestinian Arabs violently killed by each other this...

Tzipi is a dirty, dirty girl

From Gulf Daily News:MPs demanded an apology yesterday after Foreign Minister Shaikh Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa accused them of having Palestinian blood on their hands. An MP, who urged the minister to wash his hands after meeting Israel Foreign Minister Tzipora "Tzipi" Livni, later backtracked saying he was only suggesting that Ms Livni was "dirty". "I meant Tzipi is dirty and Shaikh Khalid, who is clean, should purify his hands," said MP Nasser...

Elder's law of unintended consequences

Every major diplomatic push for "peace" in the Middle East will result in consequences that are not close to the original intentions of the would-be peacemakers.These consequences are, more often than not, very far from peacefu...

PalArabs now blame Israel for every medical death in Gaza

A new, fashionable way to blame Israel for, well, everything is sweeping throughout the PalArab media and it is only a matter of time before the Western blame-Israel crowd jumps on the bandwagon.According to PalArab Gaza sources, we are now up to 20 people who have died in the past few weeks from not being allowed to travel to Israel to get medical treatment. The rate of these deaths has skyrocketed in the past few weeks though, beforehand you would...

Shari'a Sunday, part 2: Major banks go Islamic

From NYT: Rising oil wealth is lifting Islamic banking -- banking that adheres to the laws of the Koran and its prohibition against charging interest -- into the financial mainstream. Big banks, including Citigroup, HSBC and Deutsche Bank, as well as financial capitals like London, Tokyo and Hong Kong, are all going into the Islamic banking business. An estimated 300 Islamic financial institutions hold at least US$500 billion in assets, and deposits...

Shari'a Sunday, part 1: Update on Saudi rape case

From AFP: A woman in Saudi Arabia sentenced to six months in jail and 200 lashes despite being gang raped has confessed to adultery, the justice ministry said on Saturday as it tried to fend off mounting criticism.Despite being sexually assaulted by seven men who kidnapped her with a male companion at knife-point, the unidentified 19 year-old woman was sentenced in November 2006 to 90 lashes.The judge sentenced her for being in a car with a man who...