Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, December 16, 2010

Another unintentionally funny anti-Israel protest

If you can stand more than a minute of that horrible singing and out-of-sync "dancing" asking AIPAC to "leave Iran alone," you are made of stronger stuff than I am.

Time to play: Spot the Reuters bias!

Reuters has what could have been a good article, by Mara Arwad, about Bedouin in the Sinai smuggling arms to Gaza, but it just cannot resist finding reason to blame Israel at every turn.

It starts off as an interesting story:

Sitting cross-legged in the desert darkness, a 44-year-old Bedouin tribesman was describing how he smuggles weapons across Egypt's Sinai desert to the Gaza Strip when a heavily laden four-wheel drive vehicle pulled up.

"The latest deal just arrived from Sudan, come and see," said 'Aref' the smuggler, rising to greet the driver, who shut off the headlights that had briefly pierced the moonless night.

"These are 80 Kalashnikovs," said Aref, flinging open the trunk to reveal the stacked assault rifles, gleaming dimly in the flashlight held by his Bedouin assistant. "We will bury this shipment in the desert until we find a buyer."

Arms smuggling by Bedouin tribal networks, mainly by land along Egypt's southern border with Sudan, across the Sinai peninsula and into the Hamas-run Gaza Strip is on the uptick, according to an Egyptian official, who asked not to be named.

Sudan denies that it allows any kind of weapons shipments across its territory to any destination.

But then it takes its usual anti-Israel course:

"Sinai suffers a security imbalance," military analyst Safwat Zayaat said. "Under-development is fuelling the arms trade fed by unstable neighboring areas in northeast Sudan."

He said there was a ready market for weapons smuggled via a network of border tunnels into the Gaza Strip, controlled by the Islamist Palestinian group Hamas since 2007.

This is a concern for Israel, which has frequently complained about Egypt's failure to stop the arms transfers.

Yet the terms of Camp David accords signed by Egypt and Israel in 1978 help explain why it is so hard for the Egyptians to police their borders and maintain control in Sinai, where well-armed Bedouin occasionally clash with security forces.

The accords, signed by former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, demilitarised central Sinai and allowed Egypt to deploy only a small number of lightly armed border guards there and on the 266-km (166-mile) frontier.

After Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005, Egypt proposed raising the number to 3,500 to help it secure its border with the Gaza Strip. Israel refused, citing security concerns.

So the smuggling is happening and is not being stopped - because of Israel's insistence that Egypt remain weak in the Sinai. But wait:

Sinai's border with Israel is a main trafficking route for thousands of African migrants seeking asylum in Israel. Israel has criticized Egypt for not doing enough to stem the flow.

Under Israeli pressure to secure the frontier, Egyptian police have used tough tactics including shooting migrants on sight.

The same woefully weak Egyptian forces are using deadly force on migrants - because of Israel!

Egyptian forces are simultaneously too weak and too trigger-happy, and it is all because of Israel.

In fact, the entire article's detour into the African migrants seems designed just to throw in a dig at Israel, because it does not seem relevant at all and then goes right back to the smuggling story.

But, hey,. that's Reuters for you!

Israeli swim team competing in Dubai - but their name was not announced

From YNet:

The Israeli swim team found itself snubbed on Tuesday during the opening ceremony of the FINA World Swimming Championships (25m) in Dubai. As the competition organizers announced each participating nation while the teams marched into the arena, they failed to call the Jewish state by its name, curtly dubbing it 'ISR.'

Over 800 athletes from 148 countries are participating in the competition, which is taking place at the Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Sports Complex. The state of the art facility was built especially for the event, and costing $100 million.

The National (UAE) does not mention the snub:

Hanging from the roof of the Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Sports Complex, sandwiched inbetween the flags of Iceland and Italy, appears a sight virtually invisible in the UAE.

The national emblem of Israel represents just one of 153 countries - from Albania to Zimbabwe via Iraq and North Korea - that are competing in the Fina World Swimming Championships in Dubai.

The UAE does not have diplomatic relations with Israel, but the country's five-member team have been granted access to the Emirates and will compete in 20 events across the championship's five days.

Gal Nevo, who yesterday morning competed in the men's 200-metre freestyle, was their first swimmer to appear on the pool deck.

He said his team arrived a day late because "there was some problem with security" and added they are operating under heightened supervision, which includes seven or eight "visible" bodyguards.

Palestine Press Agency has a different spin, saying that the Israeli team was "exposed to humiliation and contempt" during the opening ceremony. Palestine Today called it a "great insult." They also mention that apparently the TV coverage did not show the Israeli flag or swimmers during the opening ceremony, unlike all the other nations.

Gaza terrorist killed - by the US

From Ma'an:

A Palestinian family in Gaza has received news that their son, Mahmoud Abu Rideh, died a few days ago in a US bombing in Afghanistan.

The man's family, from Bani Sheila - a town east of Khan Younis - heard from friend's of their son that Mahmoud was with a group of 'mujahideen' before the airstrike.

Another Gazan, just minding his own business while hanging with his jihadist friends.

Congress opposes unilateral PA moves - and J Street is upset

From Ha'aretz:

The United States House of Representatives unanimously on Thursday approved a resolution opposing unilateral declaration of Palestinian state.

The resolution introduced by Rep. Howard Berman, Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, slams Palestinian efforts to push the international community to recognize a state in such a manner as "true and lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians can only be achieved through direct negotiations between the parties."

The resolution calls on the U.S. administration to "deny recognition to any unilaterally declared Palestinian state and veto any resolution by the United Nations Security Council to establish or recognize a Palestinian state outside of an agreement negotiated by the two parties."

It also urges Palestinian leaders to "cease all efforts at circumventing the negotiation process, including efforts to gain recognition of a Palestinian state from other nations, within the United Nations, and in other international forums prior to achievement of a final agreement between Israel and the Palestinians… and calls upon foreign governments not to extend such recognition."

And which purportedly pro-Israel group opposed the resolution?

The pro-Israel lobby J Street issued a statement on Wednesday criticizing Berman's resolution, saying "it addresses only one issue standing in the way of peace."

In the statement, J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami said that the resolution continued "a pattern in which overly one-sided resolutions are introduced and moved to the floor of the House without an adequate opportunity for debate, discussion and modification by the Members."

The irony gets better. From JPost:

While Palestinian spokesmen such as Yasser Abed Rabbo were taking a hard-line public position on the talks, PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, in a teaser for an interview on Channel 2 to appear over the weekend, said the Palestinians were not going to go to the UN seeking international recognition, nor would they revert to violence if the negotiations did not work out.

Asked if he was willing to make a clear statement that no matter what happens, he would not turn to the UN for a unilateral declaration of statehood, Fayyad said, “What we are looking for now... is a state of Palestine.

“We are not looking for yet another declaration of statehood.

Remember, we had one,” he said, in reference to Yasser Arafat’s declaration of statehood in 1988, a declaration since recognized by around 100 countries.

It seems that J Street is more pro-"Palestinian" than the PA prime minister!

(h/t Lenny, Jim)

ElderToons: Nasrallah's speech to Lebanon

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah gave another of his lengthy televised speeches to Lebanon on Wednesday. Here's the gist of it:

World strangely silent on Iran missiles in Venezuela

Two weeks ago I posted about a report that Iran was staging medium range missiles in Venezuela - missiles that could reach parts of the US.

The story was broken by Die Welt on November 25th, but for some reason we haven't heard any outcry. Last week, Hudson-NY wrote about it and adds more details:

Venezuela has also become the country through which Iran intends to bypass UN sanctions. Following a new round of UN sanctions against the Islamic Republic, for example, Russia decided not to sell five battalions of S-300PMU-1 air defence systems to Iran. These weapons, along with a number of other weapons, were part of a deal, signed in 2007, worth $800 million. Now that these weapons cannot be delivered to Iran, Russia is looking for new customers; according to the Russian press agency Novosti[2], it found one: Venezuela.

If Iran, therefore, cannot get the S-300 missiles directly from Russia, it can still have them through its proxy, Venezuela, and deploy them against its staunchest enemy, the U.S..

Why isn't this story on the front page of every major US newspaper?

A short history of Iran's predictions of Israel's demise

Oct 29, 2005: "the Zionist regime will eventually rot from within and collapse"

October 20, 2006: "This regime (Israel) will be gone, definitely... this regime internally, and regionally from the outside, is cracking and is falling apart."

June 3, 2007: "The countdown for the Zionist regime's (Israel's) collapse has started - inshallah (God willing), we will soon witness the collapse of this regime."

February 21, 2008: "Countdown has begun for collapse of the Zionist regime, Haddad Adel said."

June 3, 2008: "The criminal and terrorist Zionist regime (Israel) which has a record of 60 years of killing and violation has reached its final phase and will soon be wiped out from the geographic scene."

December 29, 2008: "The final count down has started for the collapse of the Zionist regime."

So when is the Zionist regime going to collapse already? I mean, it's been five years since these predictions started.

Today, we receive the answer: it has already happened!

December 14, 2010: "Today we witness that the predictions made by the leaders of the fake Israeli regime have materialized and the failure of the regime has, in fact, led to its collapse."

See? Israel has collapsed, Iran's nuclear program is peaceful, and up is down.

Afternoon links

Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri is being protected by a high-tech Israeli device that can somehow detect weapons in his vicinity, Palestine Today quotes Israel Radio as saying. Arabs aren't thrilled. (UPDATE: English-language version.)

A very cool story about how a pro-Israel activist managed to turn around a hostile college crowd at the University of London's School for Oriental and African Studies - using this movie.

Israel's Channel 10 (sorry, Hebrew only) shows recently discovered film of Jews vacationing on a beach on Yom Kippur, 1973 - where they see an Egyptian MiG get shot down and fall into the Red Sea.

Tablet's Lee Smith talks with Israeli peacenik generals.

Here's someone who really is dealing in organ trafficking!

How not to do BDS - and an idea how to combat it

Brian of London, over at Israellycool, shows us a video from MPAC-UK where the Muslim group seems strangely happy that they came up with a "boycott Israel" protest that seems designed to piss off store employees and customers. As he writes:

The poisonous organisation, Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK (MPACUK) had the wonderful idea to find every Israeli product they can in the UK supermarket Tesco, put them all in their trolley and take them to the check out. Once there they allow the Tesco checkout person to scan everything and then, in such a witty and ironic statement of defiance, they refuse to pay and start lecturing all around on the evils of buying Jewish and Israeli products.

Wait for the fireworks when the rightly annoyed lady behind them in the queue realise what they’re up to!

I particularly like when the Muslim activists say that a Palestinian Arab child dies every minute. That means that over 1400 died just yesterday, and a half a million kids were killed by the evil Israelis this year alone! That Zionist media is really doing a great job of suppressing this information!

Anyway, just imagine if outside this same store, a few smiling Zionists would be at a table, politely asking incoming shoppers to buy Israeli goods in the store (showing the goods and the aisles in which they can be found.) Then, when they leave the store, those people can show the Israeli products to the volunteers, and they then receive a small toy labeled "Israel means quality" or "Israel: progressiveness in the Middle East" or something like that. An effective demonstration can be done for $500 to hand out a thousand toys to customers.

Which side would the customers want to support next time they go shopping?

BDSers base their entire lives on hate. Take advantage of that and people will see the contrast between Israel haters and Israel lovers.

Latest Israeli high-tech to detect terrorists

From the Daily Mail:

Airport security checks are not only intrusive, demeaning and a mind-numbing drain on our precious time. They don't actually work. But as David Rose reports from Israel, a new generation of scanning systems are so good they can pick out a terrorist by asking a terribly simple question: Are you or are you not a terrorist?

...'The system you have in Europe and America is bull****. Unless you adopt an approach that actually works, whatever technology you care to use will make little difference. The terrorists will always be one step ahead,' says Rafi Sela, a top Israeli security consultant. Through his firm, AR Challenges, he is in charge of marketing the automated Israeli method to Europe and America as a complete package - what he calls Trust Based Security, or TBS.

'How many times in the history of aviation have the scanners and security procedures that currently cause such huge anger and inconvenience actually found explosives in baggage or on a passenger?' Sela asks.

The answer, shockingly, is zero. It's true that a bomb packed by the Jordanian Nizar Hindawi in the hand luggage of his pregnant girlfriend Anne Murphy was discovered at Heathrow in 1986. But she was trying to board a flight on the Israeli airline El Al - which uses the same selector method abroad as at Ben Gurion: it was a selector's questioning that revealed Hindawi's plot.

The bombers who killed 270 when Pan Am Flight 103 blew up over Lockerbie in 1988; the 2001 shoe bomber Richard Reid; Umar Abdulmutallab, the former London University student who tried to detonate a bomb in his underpants above Detroit last Christmas; all smuggled their explosives on to aircraft undetected.

...But the point where it starts to get truly futuristic is inside the terminal building. The automated equivalent of Ben Gurion's selectors has been developed in the business park at the ancient Roman town of Caesarea by WeCU (pronounced 'we see you') Technologies.

'The beauty of this is that you can do it without interrupting the normal flow at the airport, without interrogation and without infringing human rights,' says CEO Ehud Givon.

'And tests have shown it's extremely accurate - close to 100 per cent.'

Working with Shlomo Breznits, a world-renowned psychology professor from Haifa, Givon and his colleagues derived their machine from the science that shows that anyone who comes across a familiar stimulus - for example, a branch of the bank he or she uses, or a favoured chain restaurant - will show a small but completely involuntary physical response.

'If you expose the subject to something that he knows, he will react, and this produces a detectable physiological change,' Givon says. 'And it's even better if he knows this test is going to happen. This isn't a trick. Nobody is going to be deceived.'

WeCU's technology can easily be incorporated into existing airport processes, such as the stand-up computers found at fast bag drop and check-in stations. Built into the screen is a cheap but highly sensitive thermal imaging sensor, which can measure data including the temperature of the subject's skin, heart rate, perspiration, blood pressure and changes in breathing, as well as other variables - 14 in all - most of which, says Givon, are classified. When the passenger begins to use the station, all these readings are taken almost instantly in order to establish a 'biological baseline'.

Then, over the course of the next 30 seconds, the machine will expose the subject to a stimulus that would cause a response in someone involved with terrorism, but not anyone else.

'I'm not going to give you details here, but it could be a sentence threaded into the instructions about getting a boarding pass or an image on the screen,' says Givon, 'or something as simple as a statement that says, "Thank you for keeping this flight safe". And whatever it is can be changed every day.

'The point is, the person who knows about terrorism will react, and the sensor will measure that reaction. It won't pick out the person who's stressed about flying, or the guy who's worried about a tax bill. But it will pick out the traveller who seems to know about terror - in about 35 seconds flat. You don't have to arrest that person, merely move on to further checks. And by the way, the more you try to train yourself not to react to the stimulus, the more clearly you will stand out.'

Tests show WeCU's system has a low 'false positive' rate, and will typically identify just one or two per cent of travellers as possible suspects. But even they need only move to the next automated layer - another hi-tech method devised by SDS, Suspect Detection Systems, a small company near Tel Aviv. Its board includes Amiram Levin, a former deputy head of Mossad.

Already installed at one of Israel's land border crossings, SDS's airport machine is essentially an automatic polygraph. It consists of a booth in which the passenger sits, wearing headphones and responds to questions that are both spoken and appear on a screen. Sensors record data ranging from the skin's electrical conductivity to movement, both from the eyes and from the subject's left hand, which rests in a special cradle.

'Take the case of the Detroit bomber, Abdulmutallab,' says SDS's CEO, Eran Drukman. 'The security officers where he boarded, Schipol in Amsterdam, could see he stood out: he had a one-way ticket and no luggage. But his underpants bomb didn't show up on their scanners, and they had no way of knowing whether he had hostile intent - hence no legal means to stop him getting on the plane. This system gives you that capability.'

The subject facing automatic interrogation doesn't even have to answer the machine's yes/no questions in order to record a response, and some of those questions will be very basic: 'Are you involved in terrorist activity?' or, 'Are you carrying explosives?' 'Suicide terrorists aren't scared of dying,' says Drukman, 'but they are scared of being caught. That gives us the hook.'

As with the WeCU system, SDS's detector depends on the fact that physical responses to such questions, aggregated and analysed by a computerised algorithm, are involuntary. Most subjects will be cleared after just one minute.

Read the whole thing.

(h/t Zach via Facebook)

Applause for a stoning on film

From TNR:

Last week, I attended the Marrakech Film Festival. I had never been to a film festival before, but the experience was in some ways no different from what I had imagined about Cannes or Sundance, albeit with a somewhat lower glamour quotient.

... While other festival guests, together with the stars on the jury, were watching competition films in a vast auditorium, I attended a screening of Tazi’s 1989 film Badis in a smaller hall downstairs, sparsely filled with a mainly Arab audience. This remarkable film takes place in the year 1974 in the fishing village of its title, located on Morocco’s northern coast.

When the film begins, a schoolteacher and his wife have just arrived in the town from Casablanca. Their big-city sophistication immediately contrasts with the villagers: Both are dressed in Western-style clothing, and the wife has an aura of particular cultivation. The teacher, we soon learn, suspects his wife of infidelity and has brought her to this remote location as punishment. (Whether she was actually unfaithful or not is never clarified.) Here she won’t be able to deceive him, he tells her, because the entire village will be keeping an eye on her. No tenderness is evident between these two: He speaks to her gruffly and forbids her even to go out for lunch in the local café, while she sulks in response to his orders.

Solace for the teacher’s wife comes in the form of a local girl named Moira, whose father, a fisherman, rules her with a similarly draconian hand. The two have lived alone ever since Moira’s mother, who was Spanish, escaped back to her native country, an act for which the father continues to punish their daughter. Moira, who dresses up in her mother’s old gowns and sings Spanish songs to herself to escape the drudgery of life as her father’s housemaid, soon begins a flirtation with the Spanish soldier at the well. Meanwhile, she catches the eye of the schoolteacher, who suggests that his wife teach her how to read and write as a stratagem for getting her under his roof. It soon becomes clear that the two women are more interested in pouring out their miserable hearts to each other than in studying the Koran. Together, they come up with a plan to escape the village, which they finally become desperate enough to put into action.

When the men awaken to discover the women missing, the entire village is mobilized to hunt them down. Their escape route, which runs along the beach, is entirely exposed, and they are brought back in a fishing boat. Watching the men of the village gather around the two women in a circle on the beach, I ought to have realized what was about to happen, but somehow it did not process. Not until the first stone was raised did I understand. The stoning of the women was staged tastefully, without excessive gore, but it was among the most shocking things I have ever seen on a movie screen. As the scene ended and I sat back in my seat, shaken, something even more astonishing occurred. From the audience around me there came a smattering of applause.

Until that moment, really, I had forgotten where I was. Seduced by the glitz of the film festival, by the charm and warmth of the Moroccans I had met, by my vision of Morocco as one of the most free and open countries in the Arab world, I had forgotten that there is also a different reality here. Engrossed in a beautiful, sensitively made film about the sufferings of two women under the constraints imposed by male society—a kind of Moroccan Madame Bovary—I had somehow failed to realize that the rest of the audience might not interpret the movie with the same sympathy for the women involved as I did.

(h/t Silke)

Lebanon, the apartheid state

From The Daily Star (Lebanon):

Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are two times more likely to live in poverty than other Lebanese people, preliminary report findings released Tuesday have shown.

The “Socio-Economic Survey of Palestine Refugees in Lebanon” is the first comprehensive evaluation of its kind. It assesses the demographics of the Palestinian population as well as their access to the labor market and various health, education and housing needs.

The full findings of the European Union (EU)-funded survey are not expected until the end of the month, but the initial results paint a rather bleak picture for the 260,000 – 280,000 Palestinian refugees the report found to be living in the country.

This is a significantly smaller figure than the 425,000 UN registered refugees, many of whom are thought to have emigrated in search of work.

“Anyone who has visited one of the Palestinian camps in Lebanon knows that poverty is widespread there and the living conditions are simply unacceptable for a middle-income country,” said EU operation section head Diege Escalona Paturel. “Until today no reliable data on the socio-economic situation and poverty levels in the camps existed and thus all programs and campaigns have been based on estimates and guesses in the best case, propaganda in the worst.”

The survey, conducted by researchers at the American University Beirut (AUB) in coordination with United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) statisticians, found jobless rates among Palestinians to be 56 percent, with only 38 percent of the working population – 53,000 out of 120,000 refugees – considered to be in stable employment.

A mere 6 percent of Palestinians go on to attend university, in contrast to 20 percent of Lebanese, the report said. [In Gaza the number is closer to 46.2% - EoZ, h/t Zach]

A large amount of blame is being placed on the perceived lack of opportunities, limited by state restrictions requiring Palestinians to obtain work permits and which, in spite of recent relaxations, still exclude Palestinians from certain professions, such as medicine.

To put these numbers in context, it means that the unemployment rate of Palestinian Arabs in a sovereign Arab country is far higher than they are in "besieged" Gaza, where the rate is about 35%. The poverty rate in Lebanon for Palestinian Arabs is also higher than in Gaza.

So where are the convoys and flotillas by "pro-Palestinian activists" to help the Arabs of Palestinian descent who live in Lebanon?

Oh, sorry, no one cares about them, because "pro-Palestinian" activists only care when they can blame Palestinian Arab misery on Israel. When Arabs deliberately discriminate against their Palestinian brethren, it gets hushed up so as not to dilute the message that Israel is uniquely evil and that somehow Israel is to blame for the past six decades of Arabs treating Palestinian Arabs like dirt.

In this case, their fellow Arabs are simply following Lebanese laws specifically written to discriminate against Palestinian Arabs.

You know....the textbook definition of apartheid.

(h/t Backspin)

Storm reveals ancient Roman statue in Ashkelon

From the BBC:

A Roman statue buried for centuries has been unearthed after a massive storm battered Israel's coast, officials say.

The white marble statue of a woman was found after a cliff collapsed in the city of Ashkelon.

The statue - which lacks a head and arms - dates back about 1,800-2,000 years, officials at the Israel Antiquities Authorities (IAA) believe.

However, the storm also caused some damage to the Roman-era port of Caesarea.

Israel's officials are due to visit the area to assess the damage.