Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

Egypt catches another Hamas cache of terror weapons

Palestine Press Agency reports that Egyptian security forces caught a cache of weapons and explosives being smuggled to Hamas in Gaza.

It included suicide bomb belts and hand grenades.

Anti-Zionist Film Festival!

I mentioned recently that I saw an ad in Palestine Today that used this graphic:

At the time, the link didn't work so I wasn't sure what the ad was exactly for.

Now I know: it is a request for submissions to the Second Annual "Epic of Resistance" Film Festival, to be held in February in Beirut (click to enlarge):

And the sponsor of this festival is an Iranian Arabic-language TV station, called Al-Kawthar TV.

The content of all submitted works should be about "Anti-Zionist Resistance". Films that are not related to the topic of program would not be participated in the Festival.

Unfortunately, I cannot find last year's winners online.

Maybe I will submit an old Tom and Jerry cartoon and tell them that it is an allegory.

Work accident! (updated)

Hamas' Al Qassam Brigades announces the death of a "martyr":

Al Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas movement, mourned at dawn on Thursday [sic] December 2nd, 2009, one of her members who was martyred while performing a jihadi task in An-Nuseirat camp in the middle of Gaza strip.

The Brigades confirmed in a military communiqué issued on Thursday December 2nd, 2009, the martyrdom of the mujahed Yasser Sabri Radi was during their duty in the middle of Gaza Strip, noting that the mujahed was martyred after a long path of jihad and sacrifice for the sake of their beloved Palestine.

In English, this means that Mr. Radi blew himself up. (There is also a chance that he was accidentally, or purposefully, shot to death by an esteemed terrorist colleague.)

Bring out the candies!

UPDATE: Reports indicate that he was killed in a tunnel collapse.

But he wasn't killed in Rafah, but rather in central Gaza. Which means either he was working on a weapons bunker, on secret tunnels between buildings in Gaza or on a tunnel to attack/kidnap Israelis in Israel.

Shame is the best weapon

From Ma'an:

The UNRWA budget will reach zero by the New Year and threaten the regular payment of salaries for UNRWA workers as well as the level of services for refugees, the organization’s media consultant Adnan Abu Hasana said Tuesday from Gaza.

Large international donors are not paying what they used to, the number of individuals depending on UNRWA services are increasing, and several Arab states have failed to follow-through on aid pledges, the spokesman said.

...Additionally, Abu Hasana said, Arab countries have not fulfilled their commitments to the League of Arab States, which pledged to pay 8% of UNRWA’s budget. The official added that last year the Arab League was only able to transfer payments amounting to 1% of the UNRWA budget.

I am no fan of UNRWA. However, most of the world feels that giving Arabs of Palestinian descent welfare forever while not pressuring Arab states to give them citizenship is a good thing. Given that, how can the Arab states justify their reprehensible role in withholding funds for their fellow Arabs?

Here are the top nation-donors to UNRWA's General Fund in 2008:

1	EC	139,685,831
2	USA	95,726,691
3	Sweden	40,645,161
4	UK	37,498,826
5	Norway	27,574,498
6	Netherlands	23,328,149
7	Canada	16,763,476
8	Denmark	15,005,168
9	Italy	14,749,262
10	France	12,655,279
11	Switzerland	11,069,216
12	Germany	10,680,660
13	Spain	10,349,288
14	Japan	8,516,725
15	Ireland	5,919,003
16	Finland	4,672,897
17	Luxembourg	4,569,763
18	Australia	3,764,130
19	Belgium	3,009,532
20	Kuwait	2,499,958

Yes, Luxembourg gives nearly twice the money to UNRWA than any Arab country does.

So Arab nations deliberately keep their Palestinian Arab brethren stateless, and they don't even pretend to help the "refugees" - most of whom were born and will die in their host Arab nations.

With all the pressure that the EU and US like to put on Israel, why is there none to demand that Arab states step up to help solve the problem that they created? Why does the West not call out the Arabs on their hypocrisy of pretending to be in solidarity with the "Palestinian cause" while doing everything they can to perpetuate it?

Here is a beautiful example of where the West could use the honor/shame dynamic of Arab and Muslim countries to everyone's advantage. Sweden or the UK or even the UN could publicly chide Arab states for their complicity in Palestinian Arab misery, and the chart above is Exhibit A. If the West is so anti-Islam, why does it pay for 99% of the budget of the major organization that keeps these Arabs alive? More importantly, why do Arabs not even pay 87% of the pittance they pledge?

Why, in short, is the welfare of the Palestinian Arabs exclusively a Western problem?

Shame the rich Gulf states into paying at least half of the UNRWA budget. Create a ten or twenty year plan to take away the "refugee" status of Arabs born in Arab states and integrate them into their surrounding Arab society, and shame the Arab states into naturalizing the people that have been their "guests" for decades.

The weapon of shame costs nothing and would have better results than six decades of Western welfare. It would help the West, and it would help the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs who would happily become citizens of Arab countries. More importantly, using shame would nullify the usual self-serving Arab arguments for keeping Palestinian Arabs in misery. It exposes their hypocrisy and helps the very people who everyone agrees needs help.

There is no downside, except for the hypocrites who want to keep Palestinian Arabs in misery as pawns against Israel.

J-Street supporter redefines Judaism

The Daily News Egypt reproduces an article by Bernard Avishai, who teaches business at Hebrew University:

During the first night of the J Street conference, when delegates were just getting settled, a half dozen speakers — activists, rabbis and students — unexpectedly poured their hearts out. The 1,500 people in the hall, the speakers insisted, were not only gathered to represent the majority of American Jews who think US policy should put its weight behind bringing about a two-state solution. We were gathered also to redeem “Jewish values”. You heard a good deal of the phrase “Tikkun Olam”, the repair of the world, that night. And I confess to cringing at times. Was social improvement a peculiarly Jewish desire? Could Tikkun Olam, a kabalistic concept turned into a leftist cliché, cancel out the fact that the Occupation is advanced by zealots of Jewish law, or that rightist, neoconservative ideas are particularly strong (so polls show) among the quarter of American Jews who attend synagogue at least once a month?

So, Avishai has established that Tikkun Olam is a very misused concept that has nothing to do with what leftist Jews claim it means, and that committed Jews tend towards the political right. But J-Street is an avowedly Jewish group, and it is a bit hard to jive these facts together.

What is a good leftist Jew who hates the trappings of religion but wants to use it as a cover for his ideas to do?

Why, just as he redefines Tikkun Olam to fit his preconceived notions, he redefines Judaism itself!

The phrase “Jewish values”, you see, makes sense only to people who assume a world of free will. You have to believe that, generally, people have intellectual personality, individual sovereignty, and moral erudition — that more sacred than the Book is the right to interpret books. ...
So if Jews can be said to have stood for anything traditionally, was it not this allergy to dogma — this breaking of idols? Did we not see the democratic rights as, well, commanded? And, tragically, have not the land of Israel and Jewish military power themselves become idols for American Jews since 1967 — or at least for leaders who spoke for the “community”, while liberals remained aloof from its parochialism? Anyway, J Street says, “No more.”

See how easy it is? Just tell everyone who disagrees with you that they are not practicing Judaism, because you have changed Judaism from a religion and a belief system that has lasted quite well for a few thousand years into a squishy, sunny reflection of your own personality! Not only that, the Jews who did manage to hold on to the beliefs of their forefathers - Jews who hold on to the idea of living and dying for the land that they have cried over for millennia - are worshipping idols!

Voila, abracadabra, presto-change-o: J-Street is a new religion, and traditional Judaism is avoda zara!

EU to Israel: Put up that wall!

Isn't it interesting that the same people who keep telling Israel that the separation fence is as awful as the Berlin Wall are insisting that Jerusalem be cut in half...just like Berlin was?

Journalists admit self-censorship in Gaza

Al Quds quotes an Asharq Alawsat article saying that journalists in Gaza impose self-censorship for fear of arrest - or worse - by Hamas.

Over the two years of rule by the Islamic Movement, the freedom of the press is nonexistent in the Gaza Strip, according to journalists. Reham Abdel-Karim, Director of the Office of MBC in Gaza, told Asharq Alawsat, "There is no freedom ... Freedom here means to express the views of the governing party only."

Reham Abdel-Karim describes the press in Gaza as having become a mirror of the ruling party, and acting otherwise causes questioning.

"We received a lot of calls and threats. [Hamas] tried various means, including diplomacy and the threat of direct action."

He said, "I received an anonymous phone call threatening me with death if I covered events commemorating the death of late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat," pointing out that the contacts are all-encompassing: "They contact us by name, one by one, and threatened us with death."

Sakher Abu El Oun, director of the Office of the Press in the French sector, said, "Yes, we fear, there are many stories we stay away from so as not to enter into a confrontation with« Hamas. My colleagues are also staying away, either ignoring the stories, or calling up foreign journalists to do the job."

This was confirmed by Reham Abdel-Karim, who said, "There is a large blackout and secrecy on many stories in Gaza. If we ask about specific incidents they say to us individually, directly or indirectly, that we cannot [report on them.]"

And why shouldn't Hamas use fear to force journalists to report only what they want reported? It works, and there are no consequences!

Minarets, Switzerland, and power of symbolism

The world is reacting strongly to the referendum where Swiss citizens voted to ban the construction of new minarets next to mosques. Most of the reactions are critical of the decision, and the Swiss government itself was against the ban.

This controversy is fascinating because it is almost entirely about symbolism, not anything concrete.

The purpose of a minaret is to have an elevated platform from which a muezzin makes a public call to prayer. Over the centuries they have become as distinctive a part of mosques as bell towers are for churches, but as with bell towers they are not necessary from a religious perspective.

There is a secondary purpose for a minaret, which not too many are mentioning: to ensure that the mosque is the tallest structure, and certainly the tallest religious structure, in the immediate area. Muslim countries often enforce laws that make it illegal for synagogues or churches to be built taller than mosques. Christian countries have historically enforced similar laws making it illegal for other religious structures to be taller than churches.

The third purpose for a minaret is simply because it is an architectural feature that has been associated with mosques in many strains of Islam for centuries, similar to domes. It is traditional, even if the call to prayer is not done in all cases.

In Switzerland, there are already laws to severely limit the Muslim adhan, the public call to prayer. The four existing minarets in Switzerland are not used for that purpose, from what I can tell. Therefore, in Switzerland, the minaret is a purely symbolic structure - and it is this symbolism that is causing the entire controversy.

Muslims will argue as to the symbolic value of minarets in the Western press, downplaying the secondary purpose and playing up the tertiary. Mosques can be built without minarets and this ban in no way limits their freedom of worship; on the surface, this Swiss ban is not about freedom of religion.

However, the opponents of the minarets are being equally deceptive in hiding their motivation. They pretend that the ban is to preserve the skylines of their towns, but in reality the movement to ban minarets is completely about the fear of Islam and Muslims. The initiative came from right-wing and ultra-conservative parties that are often associated with xenophobia. Their most famous poster against the minarets doesn't even try to hide their real anti-Muslim agenda, as the minarets are consciously drawn to evoke missiles and the woman wearing the abaya plays on fears of Muslims.

To them, the minaret is a sign of growing Islamic encroachment on their land, and Muslims are regarded as undesirable outsiders. The minaret is no less a symbol to them than it is to Muslims.

Without symbolism, the existence of minarets is no more offensive than their ban. In this case, each side's symbolism is the same: minarets partially represent Islamic dominance and the opponents fear that dominance.

Symbols are inherently irrational, but their power is undeniable. The media, trying hard to be rational, downplays the symbolism of both sides, and therefore the passion that this issue evokes is lost.

In the case of Switzerland, the ban clearly is discriminatory against a single religion. Unless the ban is extended to include church steeples or other largely symbolic tall structures it should be rescinded. On the other hand, individual mosques being built in Switzerland must go through the same zoning rules as other buildings, which take into account esthetics and local sensibilities, and which would make the construction of new minarets relatively rare anyway. By raising this local issue to a broad-brush national ban, Switzerland is showing that it is not immune to bigotry and that the famed Swiss neutrality is a myth.

Future martyr?

In the continuing series of reader-submitted photos of adorable Palestinian Arab children published daily at Firas Press comes this photo of Sidra Essam al-Harazin:

The burning Fatah logo and the use of the smaller, reverse image, along with the obligatory keffiyeh, is very evocative of Palestinian Arab martyr posters and martyr graphics published on terrorist websites.

Looks a little like Arafat, come to think of it.

Another "mysterious explosion" kills one near Haniyeh's home

Palestine Press Agency reports that a member of Islamic Jihad's Al Quds Brigades was blown up, and three others injured, when a minibus exploded in Gaza City near the home of Ismail Haniyeh.

A doctor is speculating that it might have been an Israeli airstrike, but so far it appears to be another of those infamous "work accidents."

Islamic Jihad's Saraya.ps website does not yet have the story. I'll wait for the smoke to clear before adding it to the self-death count.

UPDATE: Smoke cleared enough for me. The explosion occurred in a Volkswagen, and the IDF denied any activity.

Dershowitz on Goldstone (video)

Here is Alan Dershowitz's critique of the Goldstone Report, delivered at Fordham University:

From Israelactivism.com

(I copied it and placed it on NMA-TV, hopefully that is OK.)

Benny Morris on Avi Shlaim

Benny Morris' book reviews are always fascinating, and his review of British historian Avi Shlaim's latest book of essays is no exception.

And he is merciless:

According to Shlaim, quoting Segev, David Lloyd George, Britain’s prime minister in 1917, pushed the declaration out of “ignorance and prejudice.” Lloyd George “despised the Jews, but he also feared them,” believing in their world-embracing “power and influence.” The people who sired the document “believed the Jews controlled the world,” says Shlaim, quoting Segev. Which is to say, the Balfour Declaration was primarily a product of anti-Semitism. Historians love paradoxes, even fictitious ones.
Shlaim fails completely to mention the relevance of philo-Semitism and philo-Zionism as a decisive factor in the issuance of the declaration. Indeed, it was probably the single most potent factor in the support of the key Cabinet ministers: Lloyd George, Arthur James Balfour himself, Lord Milner, Robert Cecil, and Jan Smuts. Brought up on the Bible and on a belief in the Jews’ contribution to Judeo-Christian civilization, these potentates believed that Christendom owed the Jews a debt--and that it must atone for two thousand years of persecution by restoring them to their land. As Balfour told the House of Lords in 1922:

It is in order that we may send a message to every land where the Jewish race has been scattered, a message that will tell them that Christendom is not oblivious of their faith, is not unmindful of the service they have rendered to the great religions of the world, and most of all to the religion that the majority of Your Lordships’ house profess, and that we desire to the best of our ability to give them that opportunity of developing ... those great gifts which hitherto they have been compelled to bring to fruition in countries that know not their language and belong not to their race? This is the ideal which I desire to see accomplished, that is the aim that lay at the root of the policy I am trying to defend; and though it be defensible indeed on every ground [he means imperial interests, and so on], that is the ground which chiefly moves me.
Shlaim would have it that Balfour, George, Milner, Smuts, and Cecil were all liars or dissemblers. I prefer to believe them.

Palestinian political aspirations, then and now, were “just,” according to Shlaim. He never applies the word to Zionist aspirations, before 1948 or after. Was Israel’s establishment “just,” and is its continued existence “just,” in light of the monumental “injustice” that it caused the Palestinians? Should the Jews never have established their state in Palestine? Shlaim implicitly leaves on the table the standard Palestinian argument that the Palestinians have had to pay for an injustice committed against the Jews by others. Nowhere in this book does Shlaim say a word about the Jewish people’s three-thousand-year-old connection to the Land of Israel--that this land was the Jewish people’s cradle; that they subsequently ruled it, on and off, for over a thousand years; and that for the next two millennia, after going into exile, they aspired and longed for repatriation. Nor does he mention that the Arabs, who had no connection to Palestine, in the seventh century conquered the land “unjustly” from the Byzantine Empire and “illegally” settled in it, forcibly converting it into an “Arab” land. If conquest does not grant rightful claim, then surely this should be true universally?
Nowhere does Shlaim tell us of the persecution, oppression, and occasional mass murder of Jews by Muslim Arabs over the centuries, starting with Muhammad’s destruction of the Jewish communities in Hijaz and ending with the pogroms in Aden and Morocco in 1947–1948. And nowhere does Shlaim point out that the Palestinian Arabs had an indirect hand in causing the death of European Jewry during the Holocaust, by driving the British, through anti-British and anti-Zionist violence, to shut the gates of Palestine, which was the only possible safe haven, after the United States and the Anglo-Saxon world had shut their gates to escaping European Jews. And, more directly, Palestinian (and other Arab) leaders contributed to the Holocaust by politically supporting Hitler and, in the case of Haj Amin al Husseini, actually working in Berlin for the Third Reich, peddling Nazi propaganda to the Arab world and raising troops for the Wehrmacht.

About Israel’s restrictions on the flow of goods into the Gaza Strip since the Hamas takeover, Shlaim observes that “the aim was to starve the people of Gaza into submission” and resulted in “a humanitarian catastrophe.” This is simply wild. Darfur is a humanitarian catastrophe. Somalia at times has been a humanitarian catastrophe. But Gaza? As far as I know, no Gazan has died of thirst or starvation. There are no African-style bloated bellies there. It is true that Israel has barred the importation of iron and steel and other materials needed for reconstructing houses destroyed or damaged in the December 2008–January 2009 campaign (and, in my view mistakenly, also barred the entry into Gaza of various other goods). But Israel argues, with solid logic, that Hamas would immediately use these materials to rebuild bunkers, munitions storage facilities, trenchworks, and the other institutions and instruments of its aggression.

Read the whole thing.