Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: 2009

Showing posts with label 2009. Show all posts

Monday, October 23, 2023

A brief history of Gaza aid being stolen by Hamas

In 2018, Middle East Online reported:

Hamas is accused of deepening the crisis of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, after the criticism it has been exposed to regarding the seizure of international grant funds and aid from more than one party.
Hamas, as it controls the Gaza Strip, receives millions of dollars in support from countries and international organizations to build hospitals, schools, and roads for more than two million Palestinians stuck in the Gaza Strip.
Despite the harsh measures and siege imposed by Israel on Gaza under the pretext of preventing Hamas from arming, which further complicates the lives of Palestinians, the movement spends a lot of money to purchase and develop weapons and equip its military arm, the Al-Qassam Brigades.
Hamas is accused by the Palestinian National Authority of practicing a policy of blackmail by seizing international support, as the Palestinian government said in 2018 that Hamas “steals the money of the Palestinian people and seizes all of the sector’s revenues, refuses to transfer them to the public treasury, and imposes fees and taxes on citizens for its treasury.”

It is one of the great untold stories of Gaza: hundreds of millions of dollars worth of aid has been diverted by Hamas into its own terror operations.

Here are some examples:

In 2009, dozens of Hamas militants attacked a charity, Cooperative Housing Foundation International (CHF), arrested its workers, and confiscated aid meant for needy families.

In February 2009, UNRWA accused Hamas of stealing over 3,500 blankets and 406 food parcels meant for UNRWA "refugees." Days later, UNRWA said Hamas stole 200 tons of wheat and 100 tons of rice.

In 2010, French aid group Help Doctors accused Hamas on Wednesday of seizing computer equipment, telephones, chairs, office equipment and medical files.

Also in 2010, Hamas was accused of stealing medicine and medical equipment provided by the PA and putting them for sale in Hamas-owned pharmacies. People talked about seeing medicine clearly labeled "in support of the Palestinian people" or "donated by Charity X."

In 2014, Hamas was again accused of stealing medicine meant to be given for free to Palestinians.

In 2019, poor Gazans accused Hamas of stealing meat sent by Saudi Arabia during Ramadan and reselling it on the black market, along with medicines and other aid.

Meanwhile, Gaza stores could be seen selling UNRWA-marked food packages, saying in English "not for sale."

We don't know if Hamas stole than and then sold them to stores, but clearly aid to Gaza was not reaching its intended recipients.

With this history, why would anyone believe that current aid to Gaza will not be diverted to Hamas first? That's what they do. (And so does the Palestinian Authority.)

So as terrible as this sounds, aid should not be sent if Hamas is the primary beneficiary. All the controls in the world cannot stop that theft from happening, and Hamas threats keep the witnesses mostly silent.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Thoughts on the burning of the Quran in Sweden

On Wednesday, an Iraqi immigrant to Sweden tore up and burned a Quran after receiving permission to do so as an act of protest, A Swedish court ruled that burning the Quran was a legal expression of free speech and the police gave a permit for the action.

In response, the Muslim world is seething. Many Muslim-majority countries lodged protests against Sweden, and there were riots in Iraq as protesters attempted to break into the Swedish embassy.

In 1976, on Yom Kippur eve, a group of Arab youths - fueled by a false rumor that Jews had torn Qurans - stormed through the synagogue at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and tore up numerous Hebrew holy books as well as several handwritten Torahs which were ripped to shreds.

The desecration of the Torah is much, much worse than tearing or ripping a printed Quran. The best analogy to a ripped Quran would be to a torn up Chumash, a mass printed version of the Torah; tearing up a Torah is more like tearing up a handwritten Quran manuscript.

And Jewish prayer books, chumashim and other holy books are desecrated by Palestinian Arabs much more often than you know.

In 2007, I visited Samuel's Tomb in Israel, unaware that Arabs had rampaged through there the previous Friday night, tearing prayer books, heavily damaging the Torah ark and stealing a Torah.

Nearly all Israeli media ignored this incident. Because Arabs desecrating Jewish holy books and sites is simply not worth mentioning.

It was hardly a unique occurrence.

Also in 2007, Arabs burned down a synagogue near Doled, destroying Torah scrolls.

In 2009, Arabs raided a yeshiva in Homesh and destroyed many volumes of Chumash and Talmud.

In 2012, Arab youths were caught trying to burn books of Psalms at the Mount of Olives.

Holy books at the Tomb of Joseph have been destroyed by Arabs more than once.

Prayer books were burned in an attack at a Gush Etzion synagogue in 2016.

In May, 2021, Arabs torched synagogues in Lod.

In 2022, Arabs burned a Jewish center in Harasha and destroyed many holy books.

When has the Muslim world condemned these incidents against holy Jewish books - equivalent or far worse than the desecration of one of hundreds of millions of printed Qurans?

They haven't, and this weakens their pretense of outrage. If you demand that people respect your holy objects, then at a minimum you should do the same.

The Muslim outrage over Sweden is not about their disgust at a holy book being desecrated. It is an expression of Islamic supremacy.

They want the entire world to adhere to Muslim laws against blasphemy and that everyone should enshrine Islamic laws against destroying the Quran. These protests are just as much political as they are expressions of popular anger: they send a message that unless the West acts as Muslims demand, they can expect violence.

Any attempts to impose Muslim mores or beliefs on the world must be opposed wholeheartedly. It is an attack on everyone's freedom.

_____________________________________

That being said, Sweden's legal ruling allowing the burning was wrong.

From the narrow perspective of freedom of expression, yes, burning a Quran - just like burning a flag - is valid and should not be illegal. But there is another, far more important issue here.

The deliberate burning of the Quran is a hate crime. It was meant not as a message of freedom but as a direct attack on the sensibilities of Muslims worldwide. It was not an expression of criticism of Islam but an expression of hate against Islam and Muslims, by an apparent ex-Muslim.

And Sweden does have hate crime laws.

The Swedish Penal Code, chapter 16, section 8, says:

A person who, in a disseminated statement or communication, threatens or expresses contempt for a national, ethnic or other such group of persons with allusion to race, colour, national or ethnic origin or religious belief shall, be sentenced for agitation against a national or ethnic group to imprisonment for at most two years or, if the crime is petty, to a fine. (Law 1988:835)

The deliberate burning of a Quran is an expression of contempt for believing Muslims. As such, it should be illegal - and so should the deliberate burning of Jewish holy books.

The protester could make the same point by burning a photo of a Quran. Destroying symbols of a religion or other protected group is criticism; destroying actual objects of importance to those groups is hate.

That is where the line should be drawn between freedom of expression and purposeful hate.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

NPR says bombs in Israel are "rare." They aren't, but the truth doesn't serve their narrative.

NPR writes:

Ben-Gvir has called for tougher policing of Palestinians. Here's what he told reporters earlier this week after a rare bomb killed an Israeli teenager in Jerusalem.

Are Palestinian bombs rare?

Not according to Shin Bet, which keeps track of them. Assuming pipe bombs (not firebombs/Molotov cocktails) here are the number of bombs they so far counted this year:

These are not "rare" events. There are an average of more than one pipe bomb every day this year.

If NPR was doing its job, it would have known this information and reported on it way before deadly bombs exploded in Jerusalem.

And it is pretty obvious that the "rare" statement was meant to downplay Palestinian terror, and to avoid mentioning that this has been the bloodiest year for Israelis since 2015, and second deadliest since 2009.

(h/t Irene)

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

The media completely ignores the corruption inherent in the PLO and PA

On Thursday, Mahmoud Abbas led a meeting of the PLO Executive Committee, for which he has been the chairman since 2004.

Here is what the meeting looked like as they prayed to open the session:

Sixteen older white men, almost all Muslim.

Hanan Ashrawi, a Christian woman, was a member of this committee but she resigned in 2020 - partially because all the decisions were being made by old men.

Keep in mind that the Palestinian Authority (or, as they call it, the "State of Palestine") reports to the PLO. This non-elected organization is what really makes the decisions, not the PA. So for example, in 2009 the PLO Executive Committee - headed by Abbas - voted to allow Abbas to remain the president of the PA indefinitely, even in the absence of elections. This power also allowed Abbas to dissolve the High Court and replace it with his own appointees, and to sideline the legislative branch of the government when Hamas won those elections.

This is dictatorial power, and the Western media just shrugs - or pretends that the PA is a democracy because it sometime stages meaningless elections.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

HRW and the Goldstone Report authors both claimed, falsely, "no substantive criticism" to their falsehoods [Daled Amos]

By Daled Amos

With the ongoing talk about apartheid, I was reminded of a report that targeted Israel for war crimes.
Not the B'tselem report.
Not the HRW report.
Not even the Amnesty International report.

Instead, I was reminded of the 2009 Goldstone Report.

Of all the issues and topics that were going back and forth back then, one thing that stood out in my mind was the denial -- the denial from one of the judges on the Goldstone commission.

Desmond Travers, a retired Irish Army colonel, was part of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict. Whatever else Travers may have contributed to the group, one thing he seemed to make it his job to do was offer implausible deniability.

Yes, implausible deniability

In an interview at the time with the Middle East Monitor, Desmond Travers came up with the following response to Hanan Chehata:

So far, no substantive critique of the report has been received?

Well, one of the easiest ways to rebut a criticism is to deny that it was ever made (this was back in the day, before it was fashionable to rebut criticism by accusing the other person of being a racist).

Among the papers and articles that came out rebutting the Goldstone Report on issues of law, fact and bias were those from:

o  The Israeli government
o  Alan Dershowitz
o  David Matas (international human rights lawyer)
o  Richard Landes (historian and author)
o  Yaacov Lozowick (historian)
o  CAMERA
o  Intelligence and Terrorism Resource Center

[As well as EoZ.]

But you would never know it from Travers, who made it his business to assure everyone that there was nothing to see -- no criticism, no errors of fact and no controversy in the definition and application of the law.

Fast forward to 2021.

When the HRW report came out, the group apparently adopted the same strategy of denying that anyone could come up with a credible critique of what they wrote. On July 9, 2021, Omar Shakir, HRW's Israel and Palestine Director, tweeted:

One week later, Shakir repeated his claim in an interview with Al Jazeera:

Strawmen?

Anne Herzberg, a legal advisor for NGO Monitor, notes the irony in Shakir's use of the term:

Moreover, the invocation of “strawmen” is ironic, given that neither Shakir nor Roth provided any identification of who or what those strawmen might be, in order to avoid having to refute the substantive arguments.

More to the point, Shakir claims that he did not receive "almost any" counter-arguments on questions of law or definitions.

He is ignoring Eugene Kontorovich's paper, which oddly enough does address the issues of both law and definitions that Shakir claims are lacking -- as well as addressing errors of fact. Kontorovich has a shorter post as well.

CAMERA is apparently guilty of the kind of ad hominem attacks that Shakir condemns. They note that Joe Stork, HRW's Deputy Director for Middle East and North Africa who joined the group in 1996:

Before being hired by HRW, Stork openly supported Palestinian terror attacks against Jewish civilians, and opposed any and all peace treaties between Israel and Arab states.

But pointing out the anti-Israel bias of Stork is done as the context for the factual errors in the HRW report that follow in CAMERA's analysis.

Joshua Kern, a lawyer in international law who has defended clients at the ICC, also wrote one of those posts criticizing the HRW report that Shakir missed. One of the points he makes is that the report appears to water down the concept of "domination" in the context of apartheid from outright "supremacy" down to an Israeli policy designed “to engineer and maintain a Jewish majority in Israel” and to “maximize Jewish Israeli control over land in Israel and the OPT” (A Threshold Crossed, p. 49). Kern notes

With respect to Israel, a policy intended to safeguard the Jewish character of the State and to protect its citizens’ security scarcely reflects the racism of baasskaap [an Afrikaans term for "supremacy"]. On the contrary, recognition of Israel as a Jewish State has been integral to how the international community has addressed issues arising from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 1947 at the latest (when the General Assembly recommended partition between the “Jewish” and “Arab” States). [emphasis ]

Will Human Rights Watch now condemn the UN General Assembly as encouraging apartheid?

So how is it Shakir can claim that he is not aware of challenges to the HRW report?

Herzberg may have the answer.

She notes that in the actual report, Shakir's role in creating the report is mentioned:

Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine Director at Human Rights Watch, was the lead researcher and author of this report. [emphasis added]

Yet in a symposium last year designed to allow for HRW and critics of its report to confront each other -- Shakir was not to be found. Instead, Clive Baldwin and Emilie Max provided HRW's response.

According to the report, Baldwin is a senior legal advisor at HRW who provided program and legal review, while Max is a consultant who contributed research.

So Shakir is the lead person responsible for the report -- yet did not show up to actually answer for it. Lawyers who had a secondary role in creating the report were there instead.

No wonder Shakir has no idea of the challenges to his report.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Arab antisemites following their Nazi forebears

It has been widely reported that some Arab countries like Kuwait and Lebanon are banning the film "Death on the Nile" because it stars Israeli Gal Gadot. Anti-Israel groups in other countries like Jordan and Egypt are calling to ban the film as well.

This is not the first time Arab nations have banned films of Israelis, Zionists or Jews. Lebanon had previously banned Schindler's List and Wonder Woman.

The Wall Street Journal wrote in 2009 that the Lebanese even banned books about or by some Jews like "Sophie's Choice","Schindler's List"; Thomas Friedman's "From Beirut to Jerusalem", books by Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and Isaac Bashevis Singer - and even The Diary of Anne Frank. According to the article, "all books that portray Jews, Israel or Zionism favorably are banned." Previously, Arab countries have banned films with Frank Sinatra or Elizabeth Taylor for Jewish or Zionist ties.

The Arab censors have good company, as this 1936 story shows:

It turns out that there are other Nazi antecedents for Arab and Palestinian antisemitism that occurs today.

Recall how modern antisemites like to claim, every Christmas, that Jesus was not a Jew but a Palestinian refugee who was "crushed on the cross by occupation"?

Their antisemitism was also anticipated by the Nazis.

Just as Palestinian Christians claim Jesus as one of their own, so did German Christians in the 1930s, aghast at the idea that their Lord and Savior could have been a Jew who lived in Judea.

It started in 1934:

And this was picked up and expanded upon by Julius Streicher in Der Sturmer ahead of Easter in 1937:

The parallels between today's Arab antisemites and Nazi antisemites are striking. Yet apologists for modern antisemitism prefer to claim that today's version is merely "anti-Zionism."

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Did UNESCO say that the Tomb of the Patriarchs was purely Muslim?

In response to the news that Benjamin Netanayahu will visit the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron today, Palestinian Chief Justice Mahmoud al-Habbash stated that "the infringement of the Palestinian territories and Islamic holy sites for electoral contests is a crime and a violation of the Palestinian rights in the land and holy sites, and a flagrant violation of international laws and resolutions of international legitimacy, especially resolutions of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization "UNESCO", which confirmed more than once that the city of Hebron and the Ibrahimi Mosque It is a pure Islamic heritage and there is no right for non-Muslims in it like the Temple Mount and the Old City of Jerusalem."

Is that what UNESCO said?

In 2017, UNESCO declared the old city of Hebron to be a "Palestinian heritage site." But its description of the Cave of the Patriarchs does not say that it was an Islamic holy site alone:

The main monument of the town is the centrally sited Al Haram Al-Ibrahimi Mosque/The Tomb of the Patriarchs. Elements of the current building date back to long before the Mamluk Period, as do its religious associations and the reasons why it is revered by Christians, Jews and Muslims alike. The mosque is said to host the remains of God’s prophet Abraham/ Ibrahim, his wife Sara, their sons Isaac and Jacob and their wives Rebecca and Leah, as well as Jacob’s son Joseph. (?)
There is reference in the Book of Genesis to Abraham purchasing the field for the tomb. The sanctity of the tomb site was known from as early as the Herodian Period, (1st century BCE) when a monumental enclosure was built around the sacred Cave of Machpelah, whose location is now lost. This enclosure of massive, finely dressed stone blocks still frames the mosque and within it are structures that reflect later Fatimid, Crusader, Ayyubid, Mamluk and Ottoman periods. The great covered prayer hall was constructed in 12th century out of the remains of the Crusaders 11th century Romanesque church which in turn arose from the ruins of a 7th century mosque.

Habbash is lying - UNESCO never declared Hebron or the Tomb of the Patriarchs to be "Islamic," let alone exclusively Islamic. It recognizes that that main frame of the site was built in Herodian times, under Jewish self-rule. It also recognizes that it was a holy Jewish (and Christian) site way before Islam.

UNESCO simply declared it Palestinian based on the world believing that it is part of a mythical nation that never existed. But it never said a word about it being exclusively Muslim.

Given that under international law, people have the right to visit their holy sites, Palestinians are lying when they try to ban Jews from worship in sites that were holy 2000 years before Mohammed ever soiled his first diaper.

I also will note that already in 2009, when "Palestine" first bid to join UNESCO, they made it clear that the primary purpose of them joining that organization was to ban Jews from holy sites.

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