Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, December 04, 2009

Zionist Locks and a test case for "pro-Palestinian" activists

The Palestinian Authority said on Thursday it seized dozens of high-security locks in Ramallah as a part of a crackdown on products manufactured in illegal Israeli settlements. The Department of Consumer Protection of the Palestinian Ministry of National Economy said it confiscated 70 “Mul-T-Lock” products, which are produced in a factory in the settlement of Barqan, near the Palestinian town of Salfit. Abdul Hamid Mizher, the director of the consumer protection department appealed in a statement to all Palestinian merchants to abide by the ministry’s instructions to boycott settlement products.

Mul-T-Lock is one of many companies that reside in the Barkan Industrial Zone. About 40% of the 6000 workers in that zone are Palestinian Arabs. When the PA tries to boycott these products, they are hurting their own economy. Israeli anti-settler group Gush Shalom says "We hope for the complete collapse of the Barkan Industrial Zone, which is an economic mainstay of the settlement project." The Israeli Supreme Court recently ruled that workers' rights in the territories must be to the same standard as within Israel. Barkan Industrial Zone apparently fell short in many areas compared to the working conditions in Israel. This is being used by "pro-Palestinian" activists as a reason to close the industrial zone altogether - when, if they really cared about Palestinian Arab workers, they should be lobbying to improve conditions and oversight at Barkan, not shut it down and add to the West Bank's already high unemployment rate. Which makes this a good test case to find out how many people who claim they care about Palestinian Arabs really think: Should it be shut down and add to PalArab unemployment, or should it be improved and brought up to salary and working standards that will help ordinary West Bank Arabs? Should it become a test case for Arab-Jewish cooperation or should it be scrapped? The answers to those questions can tell a lot about how "pro-Palestinian" many of these activists are.

Those evil Israelis, helping the Jordanian economy

YNet reports:

Jordanian sources claim that the export of some 500 tons of cucumbers to Israel in November has resulted in a spike in local cucumber prices.

The As-Sabeel weekly quoted Jordanian sources as saying that local merchants and middlemen purchased the produce at local vegetable markets in order to sell it to Israel at relatively steep prices.

Jordanian farmers say that during the transition period between autumn and winter, when cucumber harvests are unstable, Israeli merchants are willing to pay more (3.5-4 dinars, or $5-6.50) for every five-kilogram (10 pound) box of cucumbers.

Meanwhile, say the sources, the export of cucumbers to Israel has spurred an increase in local cucumber prices to a level of 0.7-0.9 dinars, or $1-1.30 per kilo.

Jordanian farmers told As-Sabeel that they had decided to export cucumbers to Israel despite protests from organizations opposed to the normalization of ties with the Jewish state because they could not sell them to other markets in Syria and the Gulf states.

So local Jordanian farmers found a customer for their products that are willing to pay a premium for them. In any other context, this would be considered a good thing, and a boon to the local economy. Yet since the customer happens to be Israel, their resultant greed is not blamed on the farmers themselves but on Israel for being willing to pay more for Jordanian goods!

In 1999, Jordanian farmers produced 74,000 tons of cucumbers, so the idea that selling a mere 500 tons to Israel would force the local market price to rise that dramatically is not likely.

It is worth mentioning that Jordanian cucumber farmers protested government regulations last year that forced them to lower their prices, to the point of threatening to destroy their cucumber crops rather than adhere to the regulations.

Hamas:"UNRWA aid should have no strings attached"

I mentioned the other day about UNRWA's budget shortfall, how it is partially the fault of Arab states that never paid their already pitifully small pledges to UNRWA, and that if the West truly wants to solve the "refugee" problem, it should shame the Arabs into shouldering their own responsibilities for the issue.

Hamas, predictably, has a different take on the issue.

Commenting on the UNRWA budget crisis, Hamas' minister of refugee affairs Hussam Ahmed says the the UNRWA budget deficit is a political issue, and that UNRWA is trying to use it to impose a political agenda on Palestinian Arabs.

He said "We are against the policy of Arabization of UNRWA because it pushes the international community to abandon its responsibilities towards refugees, and support towards making the refugee issue an Arab issue and not an international one."

Ahmed further said that since the "international community" (meaning the Western world) is responsible for the Balfour Declaration, the Sykes Picot agreement and the 1947 partition plan, then it is wholly responsible for the "refugees" and must pay them forever, without ever asking for anything in return.

It is almost as if he is worried that the West would one day do exactly as I suggested. Which is the best proof that it would work.

Cute kids with guns

The Sun (UK) has an expose of how Al Qaeda affiliates poses babies and small children with real weapons to make recruitment videos:

A TINY girl aged barely two sucks her fingers in childish innocence - while grasping an AK-47 assault rifle almost as big as her.
The tot, in full Muslim dress, was made to pose with the weapon dubbed the "Widowmaker" as part of a sickening propaganda stunt staged by extremists of the Islamic Jihad Union, linked to al-Qaeda.
The group - who target British and US troops from lairs on the Afghan border with Pakistan - also pictured the girl and five other toddlers with heavy weapons in front of a black Islamic flag.

The Sun had a similar expose four years ago, that time from Iraq.

Even so, you have to give credit to Palestinian Arabs for being the trendsetters in this arena. Even though it is commonplace nowadays to see pictures such as this one of a Palestinian Arab kid hanging out with a gun and his mentors,

they have been inculcating their kids with a love of violence for decades. Just check out this LIFE magazine

cover from June, 1970:

"Civilians" - the video

The video of the research that I and my co-bloggers did on the PCHR's lies about Gaza.

Turkish "analyst" says Jews ready to buy up Dubai

Palestine Today has an article that quotes a Turkish businessman as saying that Jewish money is ready to pounce on Dubai.

Someone named Orkhan Goksel says that he has warned since 2007 that Dubai would sink into debt, that Jewish banks would take over the country (since, as everyone knows, most of the banks are Jewish anyway) and - within a short period of time afterwards - Dubai will become a part of Israel.

He predicts that this will all occur by 2015.

(I have no idea why there are so many stories about anti-semitism today.)

Gaza kids enjoying 'Eid

Palestine Today has a photo essay of Gaza children enjoying 'Eid.

A majority of the pictures shows kids with toy guns:

Among the pictures was this unintentionally ironic shot:

Academic anti-semitism in the Ukraine

From Ha'aretz:

Stories appearing on several Ukrainian Web sites claim Israel has brought around some 25,000 Ukrainian children into the country over the past two years in order to harvest their organs.

The claim, which was made by a Ukrainian philosophy professor and author at a pseudo-academic conference in Kiev five days ago, is the latest expression of a wave of anti-Semitism in the country.

Jews, Israel and anti-Semitism have become a major motif of the presidential election campaign in Ukraine, with some figures making anti-Semitic statements and others condemning them. Some candidates, including a Jew and someone whose rivals claim is Jewish, blame a third rival - Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko - for bringing anti-Semitism into the race.

"Ukraine's political system is a parody of democracy," Russia's Chief Rabbi, Berel Lazar, said.

Vyacheslav Gudin told the estimated 300 attendees of the Kiev conference a detailed story about a Ukrainian man's fruitless search for 15 children who had been adopted in Israel. The children, Gudin said, had clearly been taken by Israeli medical centers, where they were used for "spare parts." Gudin said it was essential that all Ukrainians be made aware of the genocide Israel was perpetrating.

The conference, some of whose participants belong to a Slavic-rights movement, also featured two professors who presented a book blaming "the Zionists" for the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s as well as the country's current condition.

Those explosive Iranian tires

From YNet:

A tire explosion, not a terrorist attack, caused a blast that ripped through an Iranian bus in the Syrian capital of Damascus on Thursday, the Syrian interior minister said.
"The bus entered a petrol station to have one of its tires inflated and the tire exploded," Said Sammour said in a statement to state-run Syrian TV, adding that the bus driver and two gas station workers were killed when a tire they were pumping air into exploded.

Hezbollah's al-Manar television station reported that security apparatus investigating the blast did not find any traces of explosives at the scene

"Body parts are still scattered around the bus," one of the witnesses told Reuters. Several more people were wounded in the explosion in the Sayyeda Zainab area in Damascus.
The witnesses said the rear part of the bus was ripped opened. Buildings around the scene of the blast sustained damage and glass from broken windows littered the street.

Either Iranian tires are routinely made out of Semtex or someone is not being entirely truthful.

Anti-semitism in England, personified

An email correspondent forwarded me this video.

As he described it:

On Tuesday night a group of Jews and Christians protested outside Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church at the PSC’s Carol Service, with Caryl Churchill, author of the antisemitic play “Seven Jewish Children”.

The vicar of the Church, Simon Perry, buys into the PSC’s propaganda. He is onrecord as supporting the event and believes “people here would endorse the PSC”. He supports a boycott of Israeli goods and fails to see anything antisemitic about “Seven Jewish Children”.

Here is a pretty scary video of what happened outside the church:

The video features a nice-looking gentlemen who believes that Jews are parasites and Judaism has no place in England.

EoZ, Arabic matchmaker?

I just saw that a couple of people found me from a link on the site bentelhalal.maktoob.com.

It is an Arabic-language Muslim dating site.

Apparently, someone put a link to my blog on his or her profile.

I wish I could figure out who!

Iran bans makeup for women on TV

From Al Arabiya:

Women appearing in television programs will not be allowed to wear make-up because it is against Islamic law, or sharia, media on Wednesday quoted the head of Iran’s state television as saying.

"Make-up by women during television programs is illegal and against Islamic sharia law ... There should not be a single case of a woman wearing make-up during a program," Ezatollah Zarghami was quoted as saying by the reformist Etemad newspaper.

Zarghami, a former member of the elite Revolutionary Guards who has been re-appointed by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, also ordered that women guests should "preferably" be hosted by women.

Speaking at a conference of network directors, he also called for cutting down on music during programs and urged his staff to take a cue from Western action movies, which have "excellent and calm music."