Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, May 20, 2012

Seen today

Two lessons from the barn owls

Al Arabiya English last week aired a very nice story about cooperation between Israel and Jordan in using barn owls as a natural way to control pests.

Seven barn owl chicks nestled together in a wooden box in Israel's Beit Shean valley are not fuzzy and cute exotic pets, but they have become functional as they are the success of a decade-long project to use their species as biological pesticides.

In 2002, Jordanian and Israeli farmers wanted to end the use of poisons and toxic pest controls but still needed a way to safeguard their products from rats and mice.

The farmers, along with Israel's Society for the Protection of Nature and Jordan's General Mansour Abu-Rashid, began placing nesting boxes where the barn owls would breed in, up to 2,600 boxes in fields on the Israeli side of the border, hundred which are used by Jordanian farmers.

According to Ornithologist Dr. Motti Charter from Haifa University, around ten years would pass until an Israeli male owl and Jordanian female owl coupled up and bred.

"For them, they don't know that the border is here and they probably met, you know, not like people at a bar or something like that, they met one night and decided to have -- that they fell in love and they started a nest here," Charter said. "The whole concept is that, you know, it doesn't matter if it's Jordanian or Israel, they're barn owls. And for us it's a great success story because it shows, because of the Jordanians started thinking differently, started using the barn owls, they succeeded."

I'm not sure who had the story first, Al Arabiya or Reuters or the BBC. Green Prophet seems to be the source for the story.

It is a very nice story, and one that is tailor-made for Western audiences. It shows that Israels and Arabs can and do cooperate on projects that are mutually beneficial.

It would be nicer if the Arabic media would cover this story as well.

So far I haven't found a single article about this Arab-Israeli cooperation in Arabic-language media. (Jordan's Ammon News published the English Al Arabiya story.)

If there will ever be real peace, articles like this must be published in the Arabic media where ordinary Arabs can see that Israel is not as one-dimensionally evil as it is usually portrayed.

(The story can also help stop incidents such as this one where Jordanians bragged about killing an owl, and videotaped themselves doing it.)

Jews visiting Temple Mount again freaks Muslims out

On Jerusalem Day, a group of Jews visited the holiest site in Judaism, the Temple Mount.

Here are photos of them from Qudsmedia:

As usual, Muslim Arabic media is freaking out over the "usurpers" who are "defiling" and "profaning" this indisputably Jewish holy place.

The proper response, of course, is to ensure that such peaceful visits happen multiple times a day.

Stunning Jerusalem webpage from JCPA

JCPA made a great webpage about Jerusalem, featuring a nice high resolution panoramic photo of Jerusalem with annotations, as well as a video and other information. Great for Yom Yerushalayim!

Video of IDF capturing Temple Mount, 1967

JTA links to this video for Jerusalem Day, showing not only the famous scenes of soldiers at the Kotel but on the Temple Mount as well.

It is to Israel's everlasting shame that the keys to the Mount's gates were given back to the radical Muslims of the Waqf almost immediately.

Even so, this is a day of celebration when Jews finally regained sovereignty over the only capital they have ever had.

For Jerusalem Day, AP pushes a Muslim lie

On the occasion of Jerusalem Day, AP has an article about how Jerusalem is important - to Muslims. (As of this writing, there is no AP article about Israel's celebrations of Jerusalem Day.)

Here is one part of the article that shows how lazy wire service reporters are in researching basic history and believing false Muslim narratives:

After decades of shying away from an ancient pilgrimage route, Muslims are visiting Jerusalem to pray at Islam's third-holiest site, the revered Al-Aqsa mosque....

While Islam's birthplace is in the Arabian Peninsula, Jerusalem is intimately tied with Islam's beginnings. Muhammad's first followers prayed toward Al-Aqsa and only later turned their prayers east to Mecca.

Muslims did indeed pray towards Jerusalem when they were trying to recruit Jews in the new religion around the year 625. (They changed this prayer direction to Mecca when the Jews refused to join them.) But the Al Aqsa Mosque wasn't built until 690.

AP, by implicitly claiming that the Al Aqsa Mosque was a holy site during Mohammed's time, is denying the Jewish claim to the site and upholding a false interpretation of the Koranic story of Mohammed's mystical night journey, where he says he traveled to "the farthest [al-Aqsa] mosque" on a flying horse, a site not identified as Jerusalem in the Koran itself.

(The classic article on this topic is by Daniel Pipes.)

An exercise for would-be hasbarists

Tomorrow night I will be part of a panel discussion held by the American Zionist Movement called "Israel in the Write Light" in New York City. Along with Commentary contributor/Tweeter extraordinaire Noah Pollak and Tablet senior editor Bari Weiss, we will be discussing how to effectively communicate pro-Israel messages.

I believe that knowing history is essential to being an advocate for Israel, and it takes practice to hone the historical arguments down to a form that can be read in a couple of minutes.

So here is a challenge for people who want to be good at Hasbara:

In an obscure newspaper called the Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune, someone named George Smith ("a nonreligious member of Congregation Beth Shalom") wrote a polemic against Israel for the occasion of Nakba Day. It is literally filled with the usual anti-Israel lies, compressed in the space of an op-ed. Over the years, I have disproved these lies many times on this blog.

The challenge is to write an effective response that is no lengthier than the original.

Taking the time to actually go through something like this - sentence by sentence - and disproving the lies yourself, briefly but thoroughly, is a most valuable use of time. The first time you do it it would probably take a few hours, but by the end of that time you will know how to answer the lies quickly and devastatingly.

If you want to send your resulting response to the newspaper (or to me) is up to you. The point here is that while many Zionists know that this article is absurd propaganda, not as many know enough to actually prove it. Proving it and boiling that proof down to something readable is a very valuable skill, one that you can only get from practice.

So if you can, this might be a good way to spend some time this Sunday.

The Iranian version of "pinkwashing"

From Iran's FARS:

Kossari is spooked

A senior Iranian legislator blasted a gay parade planned to be held in the Muslim state of Azerbaijan on May 26, warning that Baku will soon regret holding the event.

"The parade has been planned based on the goals of the Zionists and the world arrogance (the US)," member of the parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Mohammad Esmayeel Kossari told FNA on Saturday.

"The Azeri government which paves the way for the gathering of such immoral groups as homosexuals through this method (of action) should know that it will be struck by problems in the near future and the country's political and state officials will regret this move," he added.

Kossari lamented that the Azeri statesmen act based on the Zionist thoughts and views instead of paying attention to the Islamic thoughts and their people's beliefs.

Even Iranians say that Israel is gay-friendly!

The funny part, of course, is that groups like "Queers Against Israel Apartheid" side with Iran against Israel.

The bureaucracy of censorship in Kuwait

From the Kuwait Times:

Proud of her job to keep others ignorant

Different professions have different tastes. Sometimes we wonder how the work of some people goes on, especially if it is not very common. The censors who are responsible for censoring books and other publications do an interesting job, which becomes harder during some periods of the year, yet it seems they enjoy it. In Kuwait, freedoms are respected yet within certain limits. “The limits of freedom in the press, TV, radio or other media is organized by law no. 3/2006 concerning Press and Publications, law no. 61/2007 concerning Visual and Audio Media, and related by-laws,” Dalal Al-Mutairi, head of the Foreign Books Department at the Ministry of Information told Kuwait Times.

These laws set the basic rules to deal with right and wrong acts announced or published in the media. “This is also related to books, electronic publications and games and many other things. There are certain red lines that should not be crossed by the publishers, writers, authors and others. In order to check the application of the laws and that it’s not violated, there are inspectors and censors working at the Ministry of Information,” she added.

Dalal started her career as a censor at the Foreign Books Department and became the head of the department after a few years. “Many people consider the censor to be a fanatic and uneducated person, but this isn’t true. We are the most literate people as we have read much, almost every day. We receive a lot of information from different fields. We read books for children, religious books, political, philosophical, scientific ones and many others,” she pointed out.

“As a censor, I read a book from beginning to the end, word by word. In case the censor makes a mistake, the head of the department will be responsible for this mistake, as they should also read the book. The time to finish censoring a book depends on the kind of the book. For instance, a philosophical book needs about four days to read,” Dalal added.

...According to the law, if there is a violation, the censor writes a report about it. “Nobody can distribute any book unless he has a license to do so. The distributor should bring a copy of the book to our department. Sometimes we receive complaints from people regarding some books. Then we investigate with the printing press that published and printed this book. The printing house is responsible for the material and books printed by it and they should inform the Ministry of Information that they are printing a book, and then the book is not distributed without a license. There are some censors and inspectors from our department who inspect different printing presses to check their license,” Dalal stated.

...The greatest load on the department is during the Book Fair. “We start censoring the books in this fair about three months before it is held. We receive about 7,000 to 8,000 books to read. There are about 15 censors working on this fair. These censors take the books home with them to finish their reading. If we find a book containing restrictions, we write a report that is passed to a committee which decides that certain books will be banned from the fair,” she highlighted.

...Working as a censor is interesting. “I like this work. It gives us experience, information and we always learn something new. It takes about a year or a year and a half to become a censor, as the person is first employed as a censor assistant. The employee first starts slow in reading and it takes him a week or days to finish a book. Also, beginners are not given political or religious books in the beginning as these are difficult. Instead we give them children’s books or some scientific books, which are easy,” said Dalal.

In some religious books, the censorship department cooperates with the Ministry of Endowments. “Religious opinions may differ and that’s why we demand a professional explanation, although we have some censors who are graduates of the Faculty of Islamic Law. Some religious issues are transferred to the Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs. The banned books include publications printed in Israel, Christian missionary and Jewish books and other similar books,” she noted.

(h/t @georgehale)

Latest Latma

Didn't get a chance to watch it yet....

"The End of the Jewish Left" (Tablet)

A very interesting article:

[T]he softening mainstream liberalism of American Jews can be seen as the feeble remnant of what was once a fiery and uncompromising leftism. Indeed, as historian Tony Michels said at the YIVO conference, the history of American Communism “cannot be understood without Jews.” But the mood of the conference was best summed up in the title of the keynote address, by the political philosopher Michael Walzer: “The Strangeness of Jewish Leftism.” What was once a proud inheritance now seems like a problem in need of a solution. For many Jews, it remains axiomatic that Judaism is a religion of social justice and progress; the phrase “tikkun olam” has become a convenient shorthand for the idea that Judaism is best expressed in “repair of the world.”

In his speech, and in his new book In God’s Shadow: Politics and the Hebrew Bible, Walzer offers a contrary vision of traditional Judaism, which he argues “offers precious little support to left politics”—a truth that he recognized would surprise those who, like himself, “grew up believing that Judaism and socialism were pretty much the same thing.” If a leftist political message cannot readily be found in the traditions of Judaism, it follows that the explosion of Jewish leftism in the late 19th century was actually a rupture with Jewish history, and potentially a traumatic one.

Walzer’s reluctance to associate Judaism too simply with leftist politics, or indeed with any politics, represents a break from his earlier thinking. In his influential 1985 book Exodus and Revolution, for instance, Walzer argued that the Exodus narrative had provided a template for generations of revolutionaries and progressives in Western society, offering a model of how to escape an oppressive past and create a better future. The contrast with his new book could not be sharper. In this work, Walzer reads the Bible with an eye to its explicit and implicit teachings about politics and finds that its most eloquent message on the subject is silence. “The political activity of ordinary people is not a Biblical subject,” he writes, “nor is there any explicit recognition of political space, an agora or forum, where people congregate to argue about and decide on the policies of the community.”

Coming from Walzer, who co-edited a multivolume treatise on “The Jewish Political Tradition,” and who has been one of the leading theorists of mainstream left-liberalism for decades, this emphasis on the antipolitical nature of the Bible is striking. In his YIVO speech, he listed six central features of traditional Judaism that made it a conservative force, including the very idea of Jews as a chosen people—an idea that cannot easily be made to harmonize with universalism and egalitarianism.

...The left’s rejection of Judaism, Walzer concluded in his speech at YIVO, was both “necessary and profoundly wrong.” Necessary, because traditional Judaism did not offer a basis for a social justice movement; but also wrong, because the severance with tradition rendered the Jewish left culturally disoriented and spiritually impoverished.

While a number of speakers at the YIVO conference invoked Isaac Deutscher’s concept of the “non-Jewish Jew”—figures like Trotsky or Rosa Luxemburg, who rejected on principle any definition of themselves or their goals in Jewish terms—both Walzer and Ezra Mendelsohn warned against the idea that identity could be so abstract and universalized. Walzer called instead for a renewed critical engagement with Jewish tradition, including a return to the Jewish calendar and Jewish lifecycle events.

If this represents a kind of retrenchment on the part of the left, it is partly because the Jewish left has lost any certainty that the future is on its side. In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu is the strongest and most popular leader in decades; in both Israel and America, the fastest-growing section of the Jewish population is the Orthodox, a right-leaning group who 50 years ago, Mendelsohn recalled, seemed headed for extinction. Still, political fortunes can always change, and Mendelsohn concluded his speech, and the conference, with a wan prophecy that the Jewish left would return: “Maybe I won’t see it, but my grandchildren will.”

...The problem for the left today is that it has gone over largely—but not, Geras and others insisted, wholly—to the negative view of Judaism as an obstacle to human progress. Israel, Geras held, “has been an alibi for a new climate of anti-Semitism on the left,” a development whose full venomousness can only be seen in Europe. (“I don’t think people here realize,” he said mournfully, “what it’s like to be a Jewish leftist in Britain today,” comparing it to living in a sea of poison.) This is the atmosphere that the Anglo-Jewish novelist Howard Jacobson evoked so powerfully in his recent novel The Finkler Question: one in which hostility to Israel is a reflex and insinuations about Jewish power and the “Jewish lobby” go unchallenged.

(h/t @WarpedMirrorPMB)

Bahrain and Saudi Arabia discovered to be Zionist

As if you needed any more evidence after my post this morning about a Saudi company buying software from Israel, we have this from Hezbollah's Al Manar:

Thousands of people demonstrated in Tehran on Friday to protest a proposed union of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

The authorities had urged citizens to protest the American plan to annex Bahrain to Saudi Arabia and express their anger against the “lackey regimes of Al-Khalifa and Al-Saud”.

Media reports said demonstrators in the capital, many brandishing the Bahraini flag, shouted "death" to America, Israel, the "traitors" Al-Saud and Al-Khalifa. Official media also reported protests in other cities.

This week’s Friday prayer leader Ayatollah Kazem Sedighi said the "US-Zionist plot" to create a union between will fail. "Recently ... (Riyadh and Manama) came up with this plot to annex Bahrain to Saudi Arabia ... They call it a union but they want Bahrain to lose its identity instead of giving in to its people's demands," the cleric said on state radio.

"This is US-Zionist conspiracy and they should know that the Muslim people of the world and the Iranians will not tolerate this plot ... Saudi Arabia did not prevail by its military presence there, and will gain nothing in this plot except disgrace," he added.

The plan, floated last December, was Saudi Arabia's idea, not America's. And the smaller Gulf states are not too keen about it anyway.

But this hysterical reaction by Iran (and its Lebanese proxies) is interesting, mostly because of Iran's own territorial designs on Bahraini territory.