2011 ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Saturday, December 31, 2011

Should Israel Get Some Credit?

Guest post by Challah Hu Akbar aka CHA On January 26, 2011, Treasury designated Ayman Joumaa, as well as nine individuals and 19 entities as Specially Designated Narcotics Traffickers. According to Treasury, Joumaa’s network “used LCB [Lebanese Canadian Bank] to launder narcotics proceeds.” In addition, Treasury said that “Hizballah derived financial support from the criminal activities of Joumaa’s network.” When...

From Ma'an: The Hamas-run government has launched a series of campaigns targeting fortune-tellers, mannequins and cigarette vendors in the Gaza Strip. Police sources told Ma'an that 142 fortune tellers were forced to sign an agreement at the Ministry of Interior pledging that they would not practice their craft. As well as predicting the future, fortune tellers sell...

From JPost last Wednesday: The man murdered in his Tel Aviv apartment on Wednesday has been named as 70-year-old French chemistry expert Dr. Eli Laluz. Laluz was found with stab wounds in a burned out home on Dizengofff Street by emergency responders. He stated in the apartment during periodic visits to Israel. Laluz earned his doctorate from the Weizmann Institute in...

The Museum of Palestinian Propaganda

In 2008, there was a stone-laying ceremony in Bethlehem for a new museum called the Palestinian Riwaya Museum. Riwaya means "narrative." It is funded and supported by Norway and UNESCO. The curator of the museum, Samar Martha, was interviewed recently, and her words make it appear that this cultural institution is really more interested in propaganda than in truth. Are their specific historical aspects that you wish to emphasize? We have only...

Unity! Hamas continues to arrest Fatah members in Gaza

As we've been reporting every day this week, Hamas continues to harass Fatah members in Gaza. Today, they arrested 16 more prominent Fatah members. According to Palestine Press Agency, the urgency of the recent arrests is to stop Fatah members from putting on any demonstration to celebrate the 47th anniversary of the PLO on Sunday. Hamas has also been ripping down signs and posters that show support for Fata...

Heads up.... Thousands of Islamist opposition supporters demonstrated Friday in Amman to demand reform, a week after the movement's offices in a northern city were torched during clashes with loyalists. Chanting "enough is enough," around 7,000 people, including Islamists, youths and tribesmen, marched from Al-Husseini mosque in central Amman to the nearby city hall,...

Israel, better than ever (Yaacov Lozowick)

Yaacov writes one of his now-rare posts, and as always, it is a good one: Economics: While the European economy enters recession if not worse, and the American economy is in a protracted funk, the Israeli economy continutes to boom. Here, check it out at the Economist website, which tells that GDP is growing higher in Israel than in any European country, the US, and lots of other places too. Unemployment, you might be interested to hear, at 5.6%,...

I'm glad that Al Arabiya published these, because if anyone else did it would be considered Islamophobic (and might get one's website taken down.) One of the weirdest and most controversial fatwas in 2011 was one issued by an Islamist preacher who lives in Europe. According to this preacher, women are prohibited from eating phallic-shaped fruits and vegetables like cucumbers,...

Latest Latma

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Israel to demand compensation from Arab countries

From Arutz-7: The government has decided to tackle head-on the alleged “Arab refugees” issue by renewing efforts for compensation for Jewish victims of Arab pogroms. Estimates of property losses range from $16 billion to $300 billion in Arab countries where Arab leaders seized their property or took it over after Jews were expelled or forced to flee because of anti-Jewish violence and harassment. Dr. Avi Bitzur, director-general of the Pensioners'...

Max Blumenthal is not a journalist by any definition

Max Blumenthal is a self-described journalist who has written op-ed pieces in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian and elsewhere. He is considered respectable. And a single tweet by him shows how he is anything but respectable, and anything but a journalist. He first retweeted a link to an article from the pro-Hamas Middle East Monitor, quoting (but not linking to) a PLO document that claims that Israel killed 180 Palestinian Arabs...

From Al Masry al Youm: Saudi religious police The ultra-conservative Salafi Nour Party is funding a sort of religious police, known as the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice Authority, according to the authority’s founders. The party has denied involvement in its formation. The authority takes after the Saudi model of “mutaween,” a sort of religious police composed...

The Sting (updated)

I don't usually spend much time on the anti-Israel blogosphere, but most readers here are probably familiar with wrong-headed, thin-skinned, and notoriously unreliable blogger Richard Silverstein. Since last year the Seattle-based blogger has made a career of publishing news items that were censored by the Israeli military. He has made a name of himself more recently by taking unsourced allegations from people who email him and...

From AP: An ultraconservative Egyptian Islamist group says sending Christmas greetings to Christians is “against our beliefs.” Nadar Bakar, spokesman of the hard-line Al-Nour party, told The Associated Press Wednesday that Muslims should only give greetings to Christians on “personal occasions,” not religious ones. Al-Nour represents the ultraconservative Salafi movement,...

From TheJC last week: An Israeli postgraduate student has succeeded in having her dissertation re-marked to a distinction after it was originally supervised and given a poor mark by a professor who campaigns for an academic boycott of Israel. Smadar Bakovic Smadar Bakovic repeatedly told Warwick University she was uncomfortable with Nicola Pratt overseeing her master's...

The Gaza NGO Safety Office keeps track of rockets fired from Gaza in their SMS messages - and also the rockets that fall short, since they are concerned with keeping their NGO members safe. So over the past couple of days they have sent out: 12/28 9:00 Pal. ops. fired 4 HMRs ["home-made rockets" - EoZ] from Gaza Strip, 3 of them exploded prematurely. 12/29 9:00 Pal. ops....

Right now, Gaza Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh is going on what was intended to be a mini-Muslim-world tour, the first time he has left Gaza since Israel's closure. He is supposed to visit Egypt, Sudan, Turkey, Qatar, Tunisia and Bahrain. According to the virulently anti-Hamas but usually reliable Palestine Press Agency website, Haniyeh...

Unity! Hamas raids Fatah homes, tears down posters of Arafat and Abbas

Palestine Press Agency reports that Hamas' attacks on Fatah members in Gaza has continued to intensify this week, immediately after the Cairo meeting between the two sides meant to solidify their unity. According to the report, Hamas security forces raided dozens of homes in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood in Gaza City and forced the residents to remove Fatah posters and banners from their walls. A number of residents were beaten and arrested. In...

US giving/selling $11 billion in weapons to shaky Iraqi regime

From the NYT: The Obama administration is moving ahead with the sale of nearly $11 billion worth of arms and training for the Iraqi military despite concerns that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is seeking to consolidate authority, create a one-party Shiite-dominated state and abandon the American-backed power-sharing government. The military aid, including advanced fighter jets and battle tanks, is meant to help the Iraqi government protect...

Israeli blog "Brilliant Disguise" has an intriguing article about the burning of the mosque in Tuba Zangaria in October. The author, Gal Chen, is not a settler or even a rightist. She is against the settlements. But when this "price tag" attack was reported in October, a number of things bothered her - so she started researching it. The first thing she noticed is that the...

From Israel 21C: Every patient, nurse, doctor and visitor to a hospital knows the drill: hands get a splash of antibacterial fluid found at every bedside, entrance and exit. Keeping hands clean can prevent some infections, but superbugs -- those sometimes deadly bacterial strains resistant to antibiotics -- can outwit the best hygiene practices. Hospital-acquired infections...

Happy New Year from the IDF (video)

I'll admit it - the main reason I am posting this video is because I like to imagine how enraged the anti-Israel crowd would be when they watch it. People who cannot stand seeing IDF soldiers as anything but bloodthirsty genocidal monsters will go crazy when they see this. The thing they hate the most in the entire world is seeing that IDF soldiers depicted as human beings. If this goes viral, I'm predicting an epidemic of aneurysms. (h/t...

Even though I fisked Maen Areikat's op-ed in the Washington Post yesterday, there were too many lies for one post. In fact, one can make an entire post from each of his lies. One of my readers, who would like to remain anonymous, did exactly that. Areikat said that the Palestinian Arabs were "the only remaining people under military occupation in the world." Certainly. Except...

From PCHR: According to investigations conducted by PCHR, on 26 and 27 December 2011, 50 activists of Fatah Movement throughout the Gaza Strip were summoned to ISS centers, each of them according to his area of residence. When they went there, they were held for several hours, during which they were questioned about their participation in celebration and honor ceremonies...

On January 1, 1997, the Lebanese government put into effect regulations that severely restrict bringing construction materials into Palestinian Arab camps in southern Lebanon. For fifteen years, these camp residents who live in already dilapidated houses have had almost no recourse to repair it. And for fifteen years, as the population in the camps grew, no new housing has...

UNRWA spokesperson Abu Adnan Hasna said today that Israel bears the legal and moral responsibility for the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, according to Palestine Today. I wonder if Hasna considers PLO and Hamas as responsible for damage to southern communities from rockets, for paying for the Iron Dome system, for the construction of hundreds of rocket shelters...

Arabs upset that Palestinian Olympic Committee cooperates with Israel

Recently, the Israel Olympic Committee signed an agreement with the Palestine Olympic Committee to help facilitate travel of Palestinian Arab athletes through Israel and to help ensure that sports equipment gets delivered to the Arab athletes in a timely manner. This is causing an uproar in the Arab world, both within the territories and from outside. Besides the scandal of Palestinian Arabs actually speaking to Israeli Jews, which is bad enough,...

In recent days, Ma'an has started writing a boilerplate description of Gaza in a number of articles: The Gaza Strip has been under a sea, land and air blockade imposed by Israel since 2007. Really? There has been a steady stream of land convoys that have been going to Gaza through Egypt's Rafah crossing over the past year, and no one is doing anything to stop them. The...

From YNet: How Youm7 illustrated the story Saudi authorities are investigating how Israeli pencils reached one of the kingdom's biggest retail chains. The Kravitz chain, which markets the pencils in Israel, was surprised to hear about the affair stirring up the Gulf kingdom. It turns out that Abu Rialin, a Saudi chain which offers all of its items for two riyals, is selling...