Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, October 20, 2006

Ahmadinejad threatens the free world. Isn't that cute?

The problem with the prevalent Western liberal attitude is that it cannot accept the existence of a fundamentally irrational player on the world scene. If one believes that all problems can be solved through negotiations, as the EU, UN and American Left do, then one must also believe that the other side is always rational and has the roughly same value system that you do.

So the head-in-the-sand crowd will always insist that if only we keep talking like civilized humans, the other side will act reasonably - because that's what we would do, and we are all the same under the skin, let's sing Kumbaya together in four-part harmony.

Ahmadinejad's outrageous pronouncements have become so commonplace that the Western press seems to be treating him more like an eccentric Kaddafi than a Hitler. Let's look at what is happening, just today:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Friday called the U.N. Security Council and its decisions "illegitimate."

Ahmadinejad told a crowd of thousands gathered at a pro-Palestinian rally in the capital Tehran Friday that “Israel no longer has a reason to exist, and will soon disappear. The Zionist regime, thank God, has lost all reason to exist”.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warned Europe on Friday it was stirring up hatred in the Middle East by supporting Israel and said it “may get hurt” if anger in the region boils over.

“You should believe that this regime (Israel) cannot last and has no more benefit to you. What benefit have you got in supporting this regime, except the hatred of the nations?” he said in a speech broadcast on state radio.

“We have advised the Europeans that the Americans are far away, but you are the neighbors of the nations in this region. We inform you that the nations are like an ocean that is welling up, and if a storm begins, the dimensions will not stay limited to Palestine, and you may get hurt,” he said.

"You imposed a group of terrorists ... on the region," he said, addressing the US and its allies. "It is in your own interest to distance yourself from these criminals... This is an ultimatum. Don't complain tomorrow."

"Nations will take revenge," he told a crowd of thousands gathered at a pro-Palestinian rally in the capital Teheran.

Iran, nearing a confrontation with the West over its nuclear program, has developed a missile called "Zelzad 1." Its namesake is a Koranic verse that tells of a conflagration which precipitates Judgment Day. The missile is emblazoned with the slogan: "We will trample America under our feet. Death to America."

The fasting people taking part in the rallies are chanting such slogans as "Death to America" and "Death to Israel" to express their hatred of the world hegemonic powers.

By the way, the last sentence was repeated verbatim in no less than 11 different articles from the Iranian press.

So, we have a man who is openly pursuing nuclear weapons, openly threatening the Western world and openly laughing while the EU and UN continues to try to "negotiate" with him, buying him all the time he needs to turn Iran into a superpower.

He also knows that by repeating his ideas about Israel and America over and over again, he will get gullible "open-minded" Westerners to eventually think, "Say, let's investigate if what he says is true." It is not a huge leap from Ahmadinejad's words to those of Walt and Mearsheimer.

Ahmadinejad's threats cannily exploit the Left's fear of conflict. If supporting Israel will inevitably lead to war, and war is to be avoided at all costs, then maybe it is better not to support Israel. All the pseudo-intellectual anti-Zionist rationalizations follow from the primal fear of conflict. The Left's antipathy towards Israel is not from naked anti-semitism nearly as much as out of this fear.

It is another variant of the century-old threat of the mythical "Arab street" which worked so effectively with Britain and its White Paper as to result in the deaths of untold thousands or millions.

Oh, we will talk a good game, saying how unacceptable it is for Iran's president to speak like this. But we won't actually do anything, just as we didn't do anything about North Korea despite a decade of warning.

Short-term self-interest of the West is the greatest ally that Ahmadinejad has.

Partisanship makes smart people stupid

I just saw this posting at DovBear:

Last night, former AG John Asshcroft implied to the Daily Show's audience that their host Jon Stewart, a great American, would not go to heaven. Here's how it went down (paraphrased):

Stewart: Let's make a bet. If the Cardinals win tonight, I'll give you a TDS tee-shirt. If the Met's win, I go to heaven.

Asshcroft: Well, my father was a preacher and he used to say he was in sales, not management... I'll tell you what. If the Mets win, you can move to St. Louis and you'll think you've gone to heaven.

So now this ancient grounds for anti-Semtism, and the pogroms and acts of mass murder that followed, is being played for laughs? Asshcroft can concede that he thinks Jews lack the spiritual stuff needed to enter the eternal kingdom of the Lord and no one boos? Suppose Stewart was black and he asked for admission to the White-only restroom. Would the audience have then tittered so appreciativly?

I just saw the clip and DB quoted it pretty accurately.

But what on Earth made him think that Ashcroft made an anti-semitic comment? Because Jon Stewart is Jewish????

It is obvious what Ashcroft meant with his "sales, not management" comment - that he cannot guarantee anyone's entry into Heaven but he can try to get people to buy the concept. It follows easily from there that what he can guarantee is that a visit to St. Louis is tantamount to a visit to heaven. All done in a very joking way, while seated on Stewart's "Seat of Heat."

This all comes back to the stupidity of partisanship. I touched on this theme last week and it has really been bugging me. It is not by any means limited to the Left, it is equally idiotic on both sides, as people obsess over the tiniest details of the lives of the people on the other side that they hate with a passion, convinced beyond all reason that the other side is Evil Incarnate.

And when Mr. Evil Incarnate makes a statement, it symbolizes Everything Bad about His Ideology and Those who Think Like Him.

How often do we have to see the moronic argument that "The other side says it is moral/just/progressive. Here is a case where someone on that side did something immoral/unjust/Neanderthal. Ergo, the entire group is a bunch of hypocritical subhumans and I cannot understand why any sane person would want to be associated with them." ?

And these are not stupid people making these stupid arguments. They are smart people who are so blinded by their ideology and their irrational hate for the Other Side that they completely lose any sense of logic or proportionality.

To use this example: Bigotry exists on both the far Right and far Left. If people are really concerned about anti-semitism or racism, let them work to eradicate it from their own side, not throw stones about the hypocrisy of the other side. If they don't, it means that they really don't care about bigotry to begin with, but only about scoring political points.

And that is the true hypocrisy.

Unfortunate and regrettable events (Self-death count now at 120)

Al-Quds newspaper reports on the three PalArabs killed in the past two days, along with kidnappings, shootings and various other mayhem. (I had already mentioned one of them in a previous post.)

It describes the events as "unfortunate."

Anyway, as best as I can piece together from the news report and from headlines at PCHR that link to nonexistent articles, it seems that yesterday:

In one "regrettable" incident, a man named Nabahin was killed as he tried to drive his car into his garage in the Bureij camp.
Another "policeman" died as a result of injuries from internal fighting last Sunday.
One guy in the Jabaliah camp was abducted, shot a couple of times and released.
A Fatah "activist" shot a Hamas "activist" in the back while he was guarding a hospital in Beit Lahiya.
The Qatshah family shot and wounded another "policeman" near Rafah.
The same family then beat another "policeman" in a field nearby.
Gunmen in two Mercedes, no doubt outraged at their poverty-stricken status caused by the Zionists, shot another person in Khan Younis.
Those ubiquitous "unknown gunmen" shot a student at Najah University as he was returning from prayers.
At a technical school in Khan Younis, about ten uniformed "militants" of the General Intelligence Service shot randomly in the air and the students responded with rock-throwing.

So we are now at 119 known PalArabs violently killed since late June. And the chaos seems to be growing.

It's a good thing they have all those thousands of armed policemen - who knows how much worse it would be without them keeping law and order?

UPDATE: 120.

hospital medical sources announced Shahid Kamal aggression in Beit Lahia town in northern Gaza last night killed one of the elements of the force executive of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Jamil Sakr Basyuni young (21 years old) shot his colleague in Beit Hanoun.

.With three citizens yesterday, including a child in two separate armed city of Khan Younis..Medical sources indicated that Basyuni arrived at the hospital a critical situation where the difference in life because of the seriousness of his health because of his several shots in the body.

Happy Qods day - part 2

In celebration of the Ayatollah Khomeini's 1979 declaration of this Friday as Qods (Jerusalem) Day, here is an article from 1910 when early Zionism was in full bloom about how ruthless and bloodthirsty the Jews were as they reclaimed their land.

Can you imagine how awful life must have been for the Arabs there? Their economy went from practically nothing to a strong agricultural one. Real estate values soared. Hospitals were built. Railroads, electricity, telephones all arrived in Palestine.

Many Arabs became rich from selling land, worthless to them, to those strange Jews who actually thought it was valuable. Land that was considered by Arabs to be unusable were turned into gardens by the Jews - who then turned around and employed the Arabs.

Arabs from Syria and Transjordan, who stayed away from Palestine for hundreds of years, suddenly decided to move there - because those awful imperialist colonialist Jews were creating an economy where there was none.

Now, today, which Arab population in the Middle East enjoy the best living standards and the most freedom?

The ones who stayed in Palestine to live together with those horrible, racist, Zionist Jews in 1948 during the "naqba"!

Happy Qods day! (updated)

This Friday is Qods Day, when Muslims pretend to care about Jerusalem. It was instituted by the late Ayatollah Khomeini.

Iran's "Religious Weblogs Office" wants all blogs to commemorate this day, so who am I to disagree?

Let's talk about how important Jerusalem was to the Arabs in the nineteen years the Old City was under Arab rule, from 1948-1967:

Did Jordan, which annexed the West Bank and Jerusalem in 1950, move its capital to Jerusalem? Ummmm...no.
Jewish families who lived in the Old City's Jewish Quarter for centuries were kicked out.
Did the Arab Muslims who are supposed to be so committed to religious pluralism allow Jews to worship or even visit Jerusalem? Ummmm...no. (The 1949 Armistice Agreement specifically stipulated that Jews should be allowed to visit their holy places.)
During Jordanian rule, more Palestinian Arabs moved to the East Bank than any who immigrated westward and into East Jerusalem. The population of Muslims in Jerusalem did not increase all that much in those 19 years.
In 1951, the Jordanian king Abdullah I was assassinated - inside the Al Aqsa Mosque, by a Palestinian Arab who heard rumors that Jordan and Israel were considering a peace treaty.
Christians in Jerusalem were also persecuted during that time period: their schools were forced to close on Fridays rather than Sundays, they were not allowed to purchase land.
While the Dome of the Rock was accorded a measure of respect, the rest of Jerusalem was pretty much ignored throughout the Muslim world.
Jordanian radio broadcast Friday prayers from Amman, not Jerusalem.
No foreign Arab leader visited Jerusalem during those 19 years.
The PLO's founding document does not mention Jerusalem. (last three from Daniel Pipes, h/t Soccer Dad.)

It would be a safe bet that this is a model of how Jerusalem would be treated if it should ever come under Muslim rule again.

Thank God that will never happen. For centuries, Jews risked their lives to move to a Muslim-ruled Jerusalem that was thoroughly neglected by the Muslim world, and Christians made regular pilgrimages there as well. Jerusalem, under Muslim rule, was a filthy and disgusting ruin, not even a shell of how it looked before the Romans conquered it.

Three times a day for nearly two millennia Jews prayed for the restoration and rebuilding of Jerusalem. It was a beautiful city whose destruction was considered a tragedy beyond comprehension by all Jews.

For nearly two millennia others conquered Jerusalem but no one bothered to rebuild it. The only people to truly care about Jerusalem were the Jews. And the reunification of Jerusalem in 1967 is considered a holiday for all Jews today.

So, I am happy to celebrate Qods Day this Friday, the last Friday of Ramadan, because when it comes to Jerusalem, the good guys won.

Observations on Palestinian Arabic media

As readers of this blog know, I've been spending some time over the past few days reading auto-translated PalArab media websites. Here are some general observations:

Unlike newspapers all over the world, including Arab newspapers, there are almost no local "human interest" stories. A great majority of "local" news is dedicated to Israeli actions.
Local crime, especially "clan clashes" and Fatah-Hamas violence, is only sporadically reported and definitely downplayed. While the 15 killed earlier this month did get some press the other violent acts that are a part of daily life are either considered normal or something meant to be minimized. Almost no individual acts of local terror will get covered in every newspaper the way that an Israeli arrest or incursion does - I have to look through many papers to find a single mention.
There is some obsession with local Israeli politics, pretty much a funhouse mirror version of Haaretz or Yediot. Small stories get large headlines and vice versa.
When it comes to paranoia, Jews don't come close to Arabs. There are many stories about Western attempts to obliterate Islam altogether, and lots of articles about imaginary plots by Jews to destroy the mosque on the Temple Mount.
As can be expected, the theme that Jews have no historic or religious connection to the land is prevalent. Articles will regularly say things like "historians have proven that there was no Temple in Jerusalem" or that Jews going to Joseph's Tomb to pray are "desecrating" it.
Normal journalistic standards that can be expected in Western media, as well as in most English-language Arab media - the pretense of objectivity - is in much shorter supply. I have no doubt that it is not as bad as in the past, now that many Arabs can read English and can compare for themselves, but the Arabic media is tilted away from the truth compared to their English-language counterparts.

A rare Hamas voice of introspection

From Reuters:

A senior figure in Hamas, the Islamist group that heads the Palestinian government, published an article on Tuesday condemning internal violence and questioning whether it had become a "Palestinian disease."

Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas who also acts as the spokesman for the Hamas-led government, said he was disturbed by growing factionalism in the Palestinian territories, including recent deadly clashes between rival political movements.

"Has violence become a culture implanted in our bodies and our flesh?" he asked in the sharply worded article, published in the widely read Palestinian newspaper al-Ayyam.

"We have surrendered to it until it has become the master and is obeyed everywhere -- in the house, the neighborhood, the family, the clan, the faction and the university."

It was the second time in recent months that Hamad, who is based in Gaza, had written an opinion piece in al-Ayyam critical of Palestinian in-fighting.

In August, he criticized Palestinian militant groups fighting
Israel, saying they were not doing the cause of Palestinian independence any good by launching attacks at moments when it appeared progress was being made.

In the article published on Tuesday, Hamad said the presence of armed men on almost every street, and their attendance at every rally, whether political or not, had created an atmosphere of guns and violence that damaged prospects for calm.
...

Hamad wrote that 175 Palestinians had been killed by "Palestinian gunfire" since the beginning of the year.

His original autotranslated article is here. It includes this startling (for Palestinian Arabs) section:

Who should be responsible? Do we all bear responsibility? Yes!!! Are we participants of this great sin? Yes!

To see a Palestinian Arab blame his own people for their problems, and not the Zionists, is close to amazing. (Other Arab newspapers are not as charitable towards Palestinian Arabs.)

As far as his estimate of 175 of his people killed by their own people this year, the number is certainly higher, although it is hard to know exactly how much higher. I counted 116 dead since late June, and PCHR lists an additional 61 between February 21st and Operation Summer Rains. We can safely assume at least 20 more killed from January 1st to February 20th, and we have seen that PCHR does not count some of the deaths that other press mentions, as well as those who die from earlier injuries. I would conservatively estimate between 220-250 violent PalArab deaths this year so far from gunfire, work accidents, random shootings at weddings and funerals, clan clashes, honor killings (both women and men!) and the like.

(H/T Soccer Dad via email.)

Three PalArabs shot at checkpoint! Alert the media!

Three Palestinian Arab civilians from the same family were shot at a checkpoint west of Gaza City.

Of course, no human rights organizations will protest this - because the checkpoint was set up by a Palestinian Arab family:

at approximately 21:00 on Monday, 16 October 2006, a member of the Baker family fired at a civilian car that did not obey orders to stop at a checkpoint erected by the family in ‘Abu Hassira Street in the west of Gaza City. Three persons traveling in the car were wounded:

1. Sa’di ‘Ali ‘Ajour, 60, seriously wounded by several live bullets to the chest and the abdomen;

2. Firial Mahmoud ‘Ajour, 57, wounded by several live bullets to the legs; and

3. Tariq Sa’di ‘Ajour, 35, wounded by shrapnel to the back.

No doubt, the family decided to set up an armed checkpoint because of the Zionist humiliation they are suffering. Or maybe they charge a toll because of the crippling economic situation started by the Zionist infidels. One way or another, it cannot possibly be the fault of any Palestinian Arabs, where the word "responsibility" is used exclusively to take credit for bombing Jews.

On the Clan Clash front, a 13-year old boy died from wounds suffered last week as two Gaza families do their best to imitate the Hatfields and McCoys. During the funeral, the mourners burned down a house and four shops belonging to the other family, and a melee resulted with five injuries, four of them bystanders.

PalArab self-death count now stands at 116.

UPDATE: 117.
Amar Taher, a Hamas terrorist, was killed by those pesky unknown masked gunmen in Nablus. Hamas will call a general strike and Abbas condemned the killing.

I only saw this mentioned in a single PalArab newspaper.

Very interesting Arabic editorial in "Falasteen"

I just mentioned about how the PalArabs are so upset over the fact that Canada is agreeing to take a handful of Palestinian Arabs who were in camps on the Iraq/Jordan border for three years.

An amazing editorial in "Falasteen" makes the explicit argument: it is better for Palestinian Arabs to be languishing in "refugee" camps with sewage running through the streets than to live in the West where they may lose their interest in destroying Israel.

The English autotranslation is poor but the argument is clear.

It starts off with the usual claptrap, as if the PalArab refugees of 1948 somehow are more special than the millions of refugees throughout history that managed to resettle in other areas:

Since the Palestinians have been subjected to the worst moral and humanitarian catastrophe at the hands of Western colonialism and its strategic stepfather Israel, What led to this unprecedented disaster in terms of the volume and quality of impact of the relocation of two thirds of the Palestinian people from the land of fathers and forefathers, which is linked organically linked and functionally normal across hundreds of years.

The author then goes on to describe the horror of the possibility that the Palestinian Arabs may become responsible for their own people, rather than the UNRWA:

On this pressured Israel and America to be with dealing with the refugee issue as part of what is called a work operating within multiple areas of service, humanitarian, technical and health - headed (by) a group of European countries in the context of each area identified him, . On this issue of the refugees is a secondary issue to be agreed upon later without reference to that section of Resolution 194 specifically, Based on this already, our attempt conspiracy to the right of return for refugees through what was known as the timely implementation of the peace program, which was famous among the top of his priorities is to transfer the powers of UNRWA to the Palestinian Authority in preparation for the cancellation and consequently the termination of the relief agency first witness to the calamity and disaster Palestinian refugees.

The next couple of paragraphs are laborious reading in the stilted translation - they include decrying the fact that Jordan is not accpeting mre Palestinian Arabs into its existing camps, and that Syria should as well - but the money quote is here:

We have warned and others in more than one location and an article about the dangers to be dissipating refugee diaspora Palestinians, since this will negatively impact on the fabric of their unity and their syndicated in the areas of asylum Chairperson, It is not evidenced by the clear position of all the levels and orientations of the Palestinian people when they insisted all, in coordination with the Lebanese government in a timely manner to the need for the Palestinian refugees accepted by the reduction of their civil, social, and we have made clear to the Lebanese government at the time that the enjoyment of those rights to those relating to resettlement, because the abridgement of the rights of refugees and civil service, and those who were already suffering from it and the less frequently today after the agreement with the Lebanese government. these will lead to migration to other European countries and therefore as a result of this disruption to the bloc refugees in Lebanon and the resulting in the end of the negative impact on their right to return to their homes and property.

What he seems to be saying here is that the Lebanese government had the opportunity (whether it was internal or from outside pressure, I don't know) to integrate Palestinian Arabs into Lebanese society and eliminate their pain of refugee status - and this was considered by the self-appointed Palestinian Arab leaders to be a disastrous plan, because happy Palestinian Arabs destroy the unity of their "people!" They might move away from their miserable camps and actually build lives like normal human beings - and this is not acceptable!

The corollary, of course, is that the fictional "Palestinian" peoplehood is a farce - that the only thing that unifies the PalArabs is their hatred of Israel and their desire to see it destroyed. On an individual basis, PalArabs have proven time and time again that they just want to be treated like human beings and to be able to raise their families in dignity, and they never cared whether this was in Palestine or Jordan or Syria, or Canada for that matter. Their "leaders," symbolized here by this writer, do not want to see individual Palestinian Arabs happy, because their main card in pressuring Israel is a huge amount of miserable "refugees." The author is saying how the Western powers, in trying to help Palestinian Arabs live respectable and honorable lives, are really trying to destroy them as a people.

Which is in a sense true - a people that would assimilate into the surrounding countries would indeed disappear, unless there was a compelling religious or nationalistic force keeping them together. Since the concept of Palestinian Arab culture and nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon, and mostly artificially created by the hell their "brethren" put them through in not accepting them as part of the larger Arab nation, they would fade away pretty quickly. Their "leaders" have a vested interest in keeping this from happening - or else they would be left without people to lead.

This is why they are freaking out over only 46 of their people moving to Canada. If other PalArabs see that some of their people have escaped the concentration camps that their leaders insist they stay in, they will start getting ideas as well.

And who wrote this article?

Imad Saladin
- Writer and researcher in the legal and political affairs
Solidarity International Foundation for Human Rights

Here the circle of hypocrisy is complete. A person supposedly devoted to human rights is openly advocating the absence of any human rights for Palestinian Arabs. (This may be the ISM.)

An interesting exercise may be to ask an advocate of Palestinian Arab rights whether they support Canada's humanitarian gesture in taking in a few dozen PalArabs from a camp where they had no human rights and letting them move to Canada. This one issue can show exactly how corrupt and hateful the ostensibly pro-Palestinian Arab movements are - towards "Palestinians!"

God Himself talks to Ahmadinejad! And guess who the devil talks to?

It looks like we have ourselves a real live prophet!

While the West is preparing to impose sanctions on Iran, due to the country's failure to suspend its nuclear activities, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is still optimistic. "We shall win," he was quoted in the Iranian media as saying Monday, and added: "One day I will be asked whether I have been in touch with someone who told me we would win, and I will respond: 'Yes, I have been in touch with God'."

And in an Egyptian newspaper article, he went even further (autotranslated):

Ahmadinejad said before a crowd of supporters that he is to receive revelation from God, and that God shows miracles to those who truly believe in him.

The transfer of information from the Iranian Ahmadinejad as saying that Bush "also receives inspiration, but from the devil."

Glad he cleared that up. I wasn't sure whose side to take.

Today's peaceful PalArab news that you won't find anywhere else

Besides the terrorists vying for proper credit when they launch rockets towards Israeli civilians...

A 20-year old, Mohammad Al Breem, was killed in another of those "mysterious explosions" that only seem to happen in the enlightened Palestinian Arab territories. Our deathcount is now at 114. Another "activist" was seriously wounded, his legs amputated.
Masked "gunmen" shot and wounded a Hamas man while he was carrying his two-year old baby.
Gunmen burst into a local government building in Bethlehem. (autotranslated)
A Palestinian Arab woman managed to start two grocery stores, because of loans given years ago by those infidel Zionist Americans who work at USAID. (autotranslated)
Hamas is very upset that Canada is planning to accept 46 Palestinian Arab refugees who were stuck in Iraq. They hate the idea that Palestinian Arabs might settle any place that their lives would be better, because that lowers the pressure-cooker environment that Hamas is fostering to aim PalArab anger against Israel.

Apparently, Abbas is equally upset at a nation actually wanting to help individual Palestinian Arabs who were suffering in Iraq. He thinks it is better to keep them in camps in Jordan or Lebanon where they would have no real rights.
Fatah condemned a Hamas attack against a Fatah media spokesman (autotranslated.)
If I'm reading this article correctly, there were also armed clashes between Hamas and Fatah in Jabaliyah, somewhere else in Gaza a 19 year old was shot and wounded, and a Fatah leader who was shot and kidnapped was returned.

Just another peaceful day in the territories, where the source of all evil is Israel - when a PalArab talks to the Western press.

UPDATE: A 43-year old man, Abdel-Salam Tawfik Younis, was killed by those famous "unknown persons," riddling his body with bullets shot from a car. We are now at 115 violent PalArab deaths since late June.

GAZA, Oct 16 (Reuters) - An intense rivalry among militant groups in the Gaza Strip has taken an odd twist with some fighters now labeling rockets they fire at Israel with Hebrew to make sure they are credited for the attacks.

A Reuters photograph taken on Monday showed an Israeli policeman lifting the remains of a rocket fired from Gaza at southern Israel, with Hebrew lettering identifying it as an Al-Quds 3, a rocket made by Islamic Jihad militants.

Abu Abdullah, a spokesman for Islamic Jihad's armed wing, said the Hebrew language label was intended both to threaten Israelis and "distinguish its rockets from those of other factions" such as Hamas, whose rockets are more widely known.

Islamic Jihad is not the only Palestinian faction to sign off in Hebrew in a bid to compete with Hamas. The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction, has also begun doing so.

Israeli authorities nearly always refer to the makeshift rockets fired from Gaza as Qassams, the name of those made by Hamas, the ruling party and Fatah's chief rival.

Hamas, an Islamist group that is officially sworn to Israel's destruction, was the first to fire rockets into Israel and so its Qassam moniker has become the generic term.

As a result, other militant groups feel they are not getting enough credit among the Palestinian populace for the attacks they launch against Israel.

Abu Qusai, a spokesman for the al-Aqsa group, said Hebrew letters were being painted on their rockets "to distinguish them from those fired by other brothers" and illustrate their commitment to "resistance" against Israel.

Abu Ubaida, a spokesman for the Hamas's armed wing, said the group had no plans to label their rockets in Hebrew.

He called it a boon for Hamas that the "factions are running an honest and positive competition in rocket firing".

"When everybody competes to strike the enemy, this is a victory to Hamas's agenda of Jihad (holy war) and resistance," Abu Ubaida said.

I seem to remember a brouhaha a few months ago when some Israeli kids signed their names on rockets that were aimed at master terrorist Nasrallah in Lebanon. Many people were very upset that Israelis could be so heartless.

Where are those people today?

(Amazingly, Reuters translates "jihad" as "holy war." Wonders never cease, although I wouldn't be the least surprised to see a political "correction" from the politically correct leader of the MSM.)

UPDATE: Jewlicious weighs in on the marketing possibilities.

The honor war

A nice article about how the West needs to understand the concept of "honor" as the Muslims, especially Arabs, view it. This is a theme we have explored before.

The Terror War Is An Honor War
By Jonathan Rauch, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Oct. 13, 2006
On August 29 in Tehran, a reporter rose during a press conference with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and asked to recite a poem. "Recite just two lines," said the president. "Don't make it too long. We don't have time. Just the best part."
"But it's all good," the reporter replied.
"So, read the middle." Whereupon the journalist declaimed as follows:
For the sake of defending our homeland, we will give up even our heads
We will attack any enemy like lions
We are known all over the world for our fearlessness and manliness
For the sake of God, we will turn our chests to shields
"Well done," Ahmadinejad said. "You were supposed to recite only two lines."
A U.S. president in Ahmadinejad's place would not say, "Well done, but too long." He would say something like, "You need medical help." By historical standards, however, it is the American reaction, not the Iranian one, that is odd.
The journalist-poet was speaking the language of traditional honor, a tongue that modern Westerners have largely forgotten -- to their peril, if James Bowman is right. In a recently published and bracingly original book called Honor: A History, Bowman -- a cultural critic and historian affiliated with the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington -- argues that honor remains a potent force in world affairs, perhaps more potent today than in many years, because it is central to the liberal West's confrontation with militant Islam. If he is right, the terror war is really an honor war, but only one side knows it.
Boiling Bowman's richly nuanced 327 pages down to four paragraphs does the book a cruel disservice, but this is journalism, so here goes. Honor, for Bowman's purposes, means "the good opinion of people who matter to us." The basic honor code requires men to maintain a reputation for bravery, women a reputation for chastity. If a man is insulted, injured, or disrespected, he must avenge the offense and prove that anyone who messes with him (or "his" women) will be sorry.
The West's history is rich with traditions of honor, and equally rich with examples of its dangers and follies, among them the duel that killed the most brilliant of America's Founders. Singularly, however, the West has backed away from honor. Under admonitions from Christianity to turn the other cheek and from the Enlightenment to favor reason over emotion, the West first channeled honor into the arcane rituals of chivalry, then folded it into a code of manly but magnanimous Victorian gentlemanliness -- and then, in the 20th century, drove it into disrepute. World War I and the Vietnam War were seen as needless butcheries brought on by archaic obsessions with national honor; feminism and the therapeutic culture taught that a higher manly strength acknowledges weakness.
"Yet we are, in global terms, the odd ones out," Bowman writes. Outside the West, traditional honor codes remain strong, and nowhere is that more true than in the Muslim world. In the modern Islamic world, few share the West's view of honor as outdated and unnecessary. "The honor culture of the Islamic world predates its conversion to Islam in the seventh century," writes Bowman.
Islam overlaid itself above honor and, unlike Christianity in the West, did not challenge it. Today's militant jihadism takes the ethic of honor to extremes, fixating on manly ferocity and glorious vengeance.
Thus, Bowman writes, "America and its allies are engaged in a battle against an Islamist enemy that is the product of one of the world's great unreconstructed and unreformed honor cultures." Jihadism wages not only a religious war but a cultural one, aiming to redeem, through deeds of bravery and defiance, the honor of an Islam whose glory has shamefully faded. It aims, further, to uphold a masculine honor code that the West's decadent, feminizing influence threatens to undermine.
Whether or not Bowman has the whole story right, the prism of honor brings puzzling elements of the current conflict into sharper focus. Americans are baffled that Western appeals to freedom and prosperity get so little traction in the Arab and Muslim worlds. America's example as the "shining city on a hill" inspired liberalizing movements from Eastern Europe to Tiananmen Square; why should the Middle East be different? One answer is that traditional honor cultures value vindication over freedom and wealth. Militant Islamism and Baathist-style national socialism offer narratives of restored greatness and heroic resistance. Ballot boxes and shopping malls offer neither. If freedom brings humiliation, what good is it?
Most wars are waged between combatants who share similar honor codes or at least comprehend each other's honor codes. This time, there is no communication across the battlefield. To Americans, it is patently clear that the attacks of September 11 were acts of unprovoked aggression; in a traditional honor culture, however, violence to protect one's honor is just as self-defensive as violence to protect one's person.
Westerners are both revolted and puzzled by jihadists' willingness to kill non-Muslim civilians. In the post-honor West, the first rule of honorable combat is not to target noncombatants. From biblical times on down, by contrast, many traditional honor cultures have made a practice of killing and enslaving civilians, whom they regarded as enemies and spoils. In a primitive honor culture, the combatant-civilian distinction is less important than the boundary between one's own honor circle -- one's self, clan, tribe, or religious co-believers -- and outsiders, whose fate is largely a matter of indifference. Modern jihadism appears to have embraced this atavistic ethic.
Traditional honor, Bowman emphasizes, is about the reputation for bravery, not necessarily bravery itself. Maintaining reputation implies saving face by never admitting weakness. When Mohammad Said al-Sahhaf, Iraq's information minister during the U.S. invasion in 2003, insisted ludicrously that Iraq was winning the war, "he was simply saying what it was incumbent on a man of honor to say if he was not to lose face by admitting a shameful defeat," according to Bowman.
More consequentially, Americans assumed, in 2002 and 2003, that Saddam Hussein would not pretend to hide weapons of mass destruction that he didn't actually possess. Why would he lie to bring about his own downfall? What seemed inexplicable to a post-honor culture would seem, in a traditional honor culture, too obvious to need explaining: Saddam was more concerned about saving face -- preserving his reputation for being fierce and formidable -- than about his office or even his life. Indeed, he could not feel otherwise and still count himself a man.
In the modern West, interest trumps honor (or subsumes it). We don't shoot ourselves in the foot to prove we're tough and fierce. Or, if we do, we expect to be ridiculed, not admired. If interest trumps honor, a country will swallow its pride in the face of a defeat or setback and make the best of its lot. For Germany after World War II (and for Japan, which was quick to adopt Western ways), getting rich was the best revenge.
In a traditional honor culture, that sort of pride-swallowing compromise may not be possible. Honor trumps interest (or subsumes it). The well-educated and talented Arabs of the Levant might today be enjoying the same prosperity and security as Spain or South Korea if years ago they had accepted Israel as a fact of life, made peace, and moved on. To Hamas and Hezbollah militants and their supporters, however, Israel's continued existence is a standing humiliation, and the debt to honor must be paid, never mind the cost.
Nor can militant Islamists settle with the West. When the post-honor West says, "Come, now, give up this foolishness, join our club, be free and rich," they hear something more like, "Be our poodle, sit at our feet, enjoy the fruits of capitulation." Admonitions that bellicosity accomplishes nothing miss the point, which is that the very act of fighting ("resistance") redeems honor and therefore accomplishes what matters most.
The West thus finds itself an unwilling, and in many respects unwitting, participant in an honor feud. Clashes of interest can end in compromise, but honor feuds proffer no logical end of destruction, as Shakespeare's Montagues and Capulets and Mark Twain's Grangerfords and Shepherdsons could attest. "There's no, to use a fashionable term, exit strategy," Bowman said in an interview.
Americans are naive if we assume that honor cultures yearn for freedom on our terms, and remiss if we underestimate their capacity for self-defeating belligerence. Although they are not strictly rational by modern Western lights, neither are they crazy. They are something else altogether: honor-bound.

Peaceful PalArab weekend

As the world headlines scream about Israel targeting terrorists in the territories, it is completely ignoring how the PalArabs are treating each other:

Fighting between Hamas and Fatah left 33 injured in Beit Lahiya and killed a 15-year old boy.
A local Gaza radio station was set on fire.
Hamas managed to find a quarter of a million dollars to pay the families of terrorists, even as they claim that Palestinian Arabs are "starving."
An Egyptian policeman was shot and killed and another wounded, possibly by smugglers and possibly from infighting.

But of course, all of the Palestinian Arab troubles come from the "occupation."

The count is now at 113.

UPDATE:
Also, an apparent faked honor crime where a girl was stabbed and left for dead; her life was saved in one of those barbaric Israeli hospitals. Hard to understand the autotranslate, though; it seems that the brother owed someone 700 shekels.

Today's round-up of PalArab martyrs, liars and hypocrites

The Hamas/Fatah conflict continues! Al-Hayat says (autotranslated):

The medical sources explained that the citizen Ali Abdel-Meguid Shkshk (30 years old) and works in the General Intelligence officers died as a result of injuries sustained as a result of being shot by unknown gunmen while he was leaving his home, located in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood north of Gaza. The masked gunmen riding in a car type "Mitsubishi" opened fire on the citizen Shkshk shot several shots where then transferred to the El Shifa medical before declaring medical sources and death.

The Fatah movement announced more sorrow and pain Shkshk martyr and said that one of its members. The "open" in a statement to the press that "Shkshk spent his youth tender and sincere philanthropic work and good drinking was one of the finest fighters and disciplined in the ranks of Fatah movement remained the most tender and faithful to his people and his cherished by the Bshmuchh and pride and sacrifice for the homeland, Palestine."

Also killed yesterday evening, the young man Majed Wednesday local commander of the Hamas movement in the town of Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip. Eyewitnesses reported that unknown gunmen opened fire on Wednesday on his arrival to his home and shot him dead with his wife was moderately wounded.

The news agency reported yesterday that seven citizens were wounded last night different Mslj occurred during a clash between demonstrators and bodyguard to a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Khaled Abu Hilal.

The agency added that the demonstrators were wandering through the streets of Gaza City to protest the killing of the young man to Shkshk shot by unknown persons, pointing out that when the arrival of the demonstrators to the house of Abu Hilal, who threw stones at the house and after the Abu Hilal guards opened fire on them, wounding seven of them injured.

The statement by Amnesty International condemning the paid bodyguards of the Palestinian Arab Interior Ministry spokesman for shooting innocent stonethrowers (no doubt with weapons paid for by Western money) is coming....any....minute....now.

This brings out unofficial count of known Palestinian Arabs killed violently by each other since Operation Summer Rains began at 112.

Meanwhile, the WaPo is soberly reporting

The Palestinian Health Ministry reports that the Israeli military operation, known as Summer Rains, has killed 290 Palestinians, including at least 35 children.

How reliable is the "Palestinian Health Ministry?"

Well, their website hasn't been updated with this new report so it is difficult to know their methodology, but a quick look there at previous reports shows this whopper:

Meantime, IOF snipers daily shot Palestinian children.

Those violations committed by the snipers, who are situated on the military watchtowers. IOF snipers shot Palestinian children, while they are on their way to schools or inside school turning 43 schools to military barracks.

So this impartial and official sounding organization claims that Israeli snipers target innocent schoolchildren every day, an absurd and transparent lie. Yet when they claim a specific number of casualties, it gets reported by the media as fact.

I am willing to guess that a large number of the casualties they are claiming are in fact PalArab-on-PalArab casualties. Yet for some reason the "Ministry of Health" is completely silent about this health problem in the territories.

Is it slightly possible, perhaps, maybe, that the "Ministry of Health" is acting as just another propaganda outlet and does not truly care about the 112 documented "Palestinian citizens" who have been killed in the same time period - so much so that they don't even bother counting them?

As long as the Washington Post reports on them as if they are a legitimate health organization and doesn't bother doing any real reporting on the farce that is the "government" of the PA, we'll never know.

Peace souk

An excellent editorial from Moshe Sharon. He uses many of the themes I touch on often but puts them all together in a very interesting way. Which makes this article worth bookmarking.

On December 24, 1977, at the very beginning of the negotiations between Israel and Egypt in Ismailia, I had the opportunity of a short discussion with Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president.
"Tell your prime minister," he said to me, "that this is a bazaar; the merchandise is expensive."
I duly told my prime minister, but he failed to abide by the bazaar's rules. The failure was not unique to him. It has been the failure of all Israeli governments, and the media.
On March 4, 1994, The Jerusalem Post ran an article of mine called "Novices in negotiations." The occasion was the conclusion of the Cairo Agreement. A short time later, Yasser Arafat proved yet again that his signature wasn't worth the ink in his pen, let alone the paper to which it was attached.
In the Mideastern bazaar, diplomacy agreements are kept not because they are signed but because they are imposed. In addition, in the bazaar of the Arab-Israeli conflict the two sides are not talking about the same merchandise. The Israelis wish for peace based on Arab-Muslim acceptance of Israel as a Jewish state. The Arabs' objective is to annihilate the Jewish state, replace it by an Arab one, and get rid of the Jews.
To achieve their goal, the Arabs have both taken to the battlefield and adopted bazaar diplomacy. In the bazaar, the most important rule is that if the vendor knows about your desire to purchase a certain merchandise, he will put its price up. The merchandise in question is "peace," and the Arabs give the impression that they possess this merchandise - and inflate its price - when the truth is they have never had it.
THIS IS THE wisdom of the bazaar: If you are clever enough you can sell nothing, at a price. The Arabs sell words, they sign agreements, they trade with vague promises and are sure to receive generous down payments from eager buyers. Yet in the bazaar only the stupid buyer pays for something he has yet to see.
The bazaar has another rule, which holds for the negotiating table too: The side that presents its terms first is bound to lose, since the other side builds its next move using the open cards of its opponent as a starting point.
In all its negotiations with the Palestinian Arabs Israel has always rushed to offer its plans - and was then surprised to discover that after an agreement had been "concluded" it became the basis for further demands.
Most amazing has been the reaction in such cases. Israeli politicians, "experts" and media eagerly provide "explanations" of the Arabs' behavior. A popular one is that these or other Arab announcements are "for internal consumption," as if that doesn't count. Others invoke "the Arab sensitivity to symbols," "honor," and "emotional issues.
Does Israel possess no "sensibilities" or honor? And what does all this have to do with political encounters?
If anybody in Israel is listening, here is what needs to be done:
Israel should stop talking about "peace." We have been using the word for 100 years, begging the Arabs to sell it to us and ready to pay any price. We have received nothing, because the Arabs have no peace to sell, but we have paid dearly.
FROM NOW ON, Israel should make a decision to create a new state of affairs, one that will compel the Arab side to ask for peace - and pay for it in real terms. For, unlike the Arabs, Israel has this merchandise for sale.
What will lead them to pay? If they conclude that Israel is so strong they cannot destroy it.
From now on, if anyone asks Israel for "plans," the answer should be: No plans, no suggestions, no "constructive ideas" - in fact no negotiations at all. If the Arab side wants to negotiate, let it present its plans and ideas. And if and when it does, the first Israeli reaction should always be: "Unacceptable - come up with better ones."
Here are the Ten Rules for Negotiations in the Middle Eastern bazaar:
Never suggest anything to the other side. Let the other side present its suggestions first.
Always reject; disagree. Use the phrase "doesn't meet our minimum demands," and walk away, even 100 times. The tough customers get the good prices.
Don't be hasty to come up with counter-offers. There will always be time for that. Let the other side make amendments under pressure of your total "disappointment." Patience is the name of the game: "Haste is from Satan!"
Have your own plan ready in full, as detailed as possible, with the "red lines" completely defined. Weigh the other side's suggestions against this plan.
Never change your detailed plan to meet the other side "half-way." Remember, there is no "half-way." The other side also has a master plan. Be ready to quit negotiations when you encounter stubbornness on the other side.
Never leave things unclear. Always avoid "creative phrasing" and "creative ideas" - which are exactly what your Arab opponent wants. Remember that the Arabs are masters of language, and playing with words is the Arab national sport. As in the bazaar, always talk dollars and cents.
Always bear in mind that the other side will try to outsmart you by portraying major issues as unimportant details. Treat every detail as vitally important.
Emotion belongs neither in the market nor at the negotiating table. Friendly words, outbursts of anger, holding hands, kissing, touching cheeks and embracing should not be taken to represent policy.
Beware of popular beliefs about the Arabs and the Middle East - e.g., "Arab honor." Never do or say anything because somebody told you it is "the custom." If the Arab side finds out you are playing the anthropologist, it will take advantage.
Always remember that the goal of all negotiations is to make a profit, and aim at making the biggest profit in real terms. Remember that every gain is an asset for the future, because there is always likely to be "another round."
The Arabs have been practicing negotiating tactics for more than 2,000 years. By contrast, the Israelis, and Westerners in general, want "quick results."
In this part of the world, there are no quick results. He who is hasty always loses.
The writer, professor of Islamic History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was previously the prime minister's adviser on Arab affairs to Menachem Begin.

Implicit in his rules is that these are how the Arabs are playing the game already.

Jimmy Carter continues to support terrorists

I've been reading the Google auto-translated Palestinian Arab newspapers lately, and it is not an exaggeration to say that they have been dominated with stories on the PalArab strike, internal fighting and the Qatari-brokered negotiations between Hamas and Abbas. While most of the newspapers are heavily Fatah-leaning it is clear that there is intense pressure on the Hamas leadership to make concessions to help ease the economic sanctions on the Palestinian Arabs.

While I believe that any Hamas concessions are simply semantic in nature and worse than meaningless in reality, there is no doubt that even the vapor gestures are difficult for Hamas to do and that they are feeling the heat from their fellow Palestinian Arabs. A small example:

Hamas politburo leader Khaled Mashaal reiterated Wednesday that his group would not recognize Israel. In an interview published Thursday in the London-based Arabic daily Al-Hayat and cited by Maariv, Mashaal said he was willing to accept a Palestinian state within 1967 borders, as well as a hudna [truce] with Israel but not to recognize the "occupation."

Mashaal addressed reports Wednesday that said he had agreed to wide-ranging concessions in order to pave the way for a unity government in the Palestinian Authority. Although he refused to recognize the "legitimacy of the occupation," Mashaal admitted the "Zionist entity" was an established fact. "There is an entity whose name is Israel, yes, but I am not interested in recognizing it," said Mashaal.

The Hamas political chief also hinted at the possibility that his organization and the Hamas-led Palestinian government would recognize agreements with Israel the PA and PLO previously signed. "We will deal with agreements that have been signed and are on the ground according to the interests of the Palestinian people," Mashaal said. "If the serve the interests of my people, I will implement them."

Again, this is nothing earthshaking and it fall so far short of any real concessions as to be laughable, but they do show that there is serious internal pressure that is even reaching Hamas' Damascus leadership.

In other words, it shows that the economic sanctions are working. While the results would be worthless, the fake progress that is happening is exactly what the EU and the US were hoping for when they decided to implement them.

Of course, that former President who wastes no opportunity to trash his own country's leadership refuses to see it this way.

Last week, Jimmy the Dhimmi made yet another of his absurd pro-terror statements, which have become so common and expected that the Western media pretty much ignored it:

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said Friday that a foreign policy aimed at punishing the Hamas-led Palestinian government through a seven-month aid freeze has failed, and called on the international community to seek other ways to resolve the conflict.

"The attempt to coerce Hamas leaders by starving the Palestinian people has failed, and it is time for the international community to alleviate their suffering and resort to diplomacy," Carter said in a statement.

The former president added that he is doubtful that Palestinian leaders will make any progress toward reconciliation with Israel "as long as the Palestinians are subjected to this kind of debasement and personal suffering."

So Carter has it exactly wrong, as usual, as he calls for dollars to flow yet again to pay for rockets and bombs aimed at Israeli civilians just as he places all his faith in words and none in actions.

Spam and Islam

As I wait in line at the Times Square TKTS booth to hopefully get discounted tickets to Spamalot tonight (I wisely indoctrinated the kids in Monty Python when they were younger), I urge you to read Omri's post on the Robert Spencer's blogger conference call,. Those of us who struggle with the hope of moderate Islam can always use a little cold water splash of reality.

Mixed blessing

It is wonderful to see the amount of support that Christian Zionists give to Israel.

It is even more wonderful when thousands of them make the decision to actually visit Israel and publicly show their support, by the thousands:

Israelis and foreigners take part in the annual Jerusalem parade October 10, 2006. More than 5,000 evangelical Christians, including believers from as far afield as Congo and New Zealand, marched through Jerusalem on Tuesday to voice their support for Zionism and the state of Israel. REUTERS/Ammar Awad

G-d knows that Israel needs all the support she can get, and from what I can see nowadays, the support from evangelical Christians seems heartfelt and sincere, without strings attached.

And yet....

In the 18th and 19th centuries, there was a proto-Zionist movement among Christians as well. Some Christian denominations openly called for the "Restoration of the Jews" to Palestine, and the wisdom of that support was debated among various prominent Christian preachers, both in the US and in England.

It would be hard to deny that the success of the early Zionist movement up through the Balfour Declaration was in some part due to this subconscious desire on the part of the Christian leaders in England to see Biblical prophecy fulfilled. Newspapers at the time showed intense interest in any story relating to Jews in Palestine, especially Jews immigrating to Palestine, and Jews being successful in agriculture in the Holy Land.

Sometimes the interest would appear to be more of an political or humanitarian nature than overtly religious. But even then, the religious and historical dimension was clear, as in this petition to President Harrison in 1891:

But there is another part of the Christian biblical prophecy regarding the "Restoration of the Jews" that is a bit more troubling. In the early part of the 19th century, just as the words "Restoration of the Jews" were understood to mean the return of the Jews to Palestine, they were just as often used and implied with two more words: "The Restoration and Conversion of the Jews."

This is an entire book on the topic (which you can download), and not the only one. Other books debated the wisdom of the Restoration and whether it fit into Christian Biblical prophecy (this one from 1828) - but the subtext was that the Jews would have to be converted to Christianity, either before such restoration or afterwards.

In fact, there were entire societies in England (and Scotland) dedicated to the conversion of Jews to Christianity, that seemed to reach their greatest influence in the early to middle 19th century.

The conversion aspect of Christian proto-Zionists seemed to die out as the actual reclamation of Jews to biblical Israel accelerated mid-19th century, and it was hardly mentioned publicly by 1900. Nevertheless, this history is enough to make one pause as to the true intent of today's friendly Christian Zionists. The idea of mass conversions of Jews may no longer make sense but the thought of an ulterior motive that lines Israel's fate up more with perceived prophecies than with what is actually good for Israel is not something that is so easy to overlook, despite the many sincere friends that Israel does indeed have today among the Christian Zionists.

Very funny ad, but let's get serious

David Zucker, the same man who co-directed and produced many very funny movies, created an ad for the GOP that is really quite funny:

My only problem is that for the past five years the Bush Administration had done close to nothing about North Korea either. Since naming North Korea as one of the members of the "Axis of Evil" in January 2002, has anything concrete been done to stop their actions? North Korea continues to arm terrorist states, it continues to develop and test long-range missiles, and it continues to develop nuclear weapons. GWB has talked tough but it is apparent that nothing concrete was done.

And Iran is watching very, very closely.

It may be fun to try to score political points and point fingers. But in the face of Iranian and Korean nukes, isn't it time to stop the stupid partisan games between Democrats who think that Bush is evil incarnate and Republicans who refuse to think that perhaps the Iraq war was not thought through correctly?

So many people spend uncounted hours hung up on Valerie Plame or Swiftboating or whatever today's perceived smoking gun is to prove once and for all that the Other Side is shallow and dishonest. Meanwhile, all that is being proven is that both sides are shallow and dishonest. Both sides are so disconnected from reality that they can both watch the same video and come to radically different conclusions. (I didn't watch it myself, so I cannot comment either way.)

Ladies and gentlemen, we are facing some real threats. Let's concentrate on them for a change.

Death toll update: 108 PalArabs (UPDATED - 110)

One really has to scour the Palestinian Arab press to find stories of people who are killed in internal clashes. Most of their newspapers ignore the stories altogether, even the Arabic ones.

Dr. Moawiya Hassanen, head of the Emergency Unit at the Palestinian Ministry of Health, reported that one Palestinian security officer, member of the Presidential Guard Force, died of wounds suffered during internal clashes last Sunday.
The officer, Rafeeq Siyam, was seriously injured last Sunday and was moved to an Israeli hospital for further treatment; he died of his wounds at the Israeli hospital.

Yes, you read right: the horrible, bloodthirsty Israelis routinely try to save the lives of Palestinian Arabs being shot by other Palestinian Arabs.

Slightly more press is given toPalArabs who die in more noble and glorious ways:

Palestinian medical sources in the Gaza Strip reported that rescue teams extracted a body of a Palestinian fighter who was killed in a tunnel explosion west of Rafah, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip.

Mohammad Naji, 25, member of the Al Quds Brigades, the armed wing of the Islamic Jihad was killed on Monday evening when an explosive charge went off while he was training other members of the brigades.
The traning camp is located in place of the evacuated settlement of Atzmona, west of Rafah.

The body of the fighter was severely mutilated and burnt as a result of the blast.

It is worthwhile to compare this story, translated by IMEMC to English, with its Arabic original (autotranslated):

One of the members of the martyrdom of Al-Quds Brigades in the internal explosion in Rafah
Khan Younis-together - medical sources in Abu Yousef Al Najjar Hospital in the town of Rafah in the martyrdom of the young Muhammad Naji (25 years) and of Deir el-Balah and the Al-Quds Brigades activists one by an explosive charge he was training a group of members of Al-Quds Brigades in a training sites in what is known as the settlement> Atassimona> west of Rafah. The sources added that the body of the martyr was taken to hospital and the charred body was found riddled result of the bomb attack in which a large volume directly.

It appears that the PalArabs know that all that talk about how people who blow themselves up are "martyrs" doesn't play well in the Western world, so they purposefully mistranslate the news story for English-language readers.

So our count of confirmed PalArabs killed by PalArabs since late June is now at 108.

And our count of official Palestinian Arab or international sources who bother to keep their own count of violent Palestinian Arab deaths that have nothing to do with Israel remains at zero.

UPDATE: 109, when Rafik Siam died of injuries from Hamas earlier this month. Interestingly, the article refers to him as a "martyr" and only alludes to his cause of death.

UPDATE 2: 110, when a Fatah member died as a result of injuries from Hamas last May.

McGreevey's former aide denies everything

This isn't really the sort of story I generally follow, but in the wake of the publicity tsunami that the former New Jersey governor has embarked on to push his autobiography, no one seems to mention a very basic fact:

His Israeli "gay lover" denies everything in McGreevey's book, including being gay. He claims he was sexually assaulted by the governor and that he is looking for a nice Jewish girl to marry.

I don't know the truth, but shouldn't the other party have at least as much of a chance to say his side of the story? And shouldn't those people who are sweetly interviewing McGreevey know that it is possible that they are joking around with a sexual predator?

"Call them ZioNazis because it pisses them off"

A remarkable piece of truth, telling the Arabs how exactly to use propaganda and lies:

Ayoon Wa Azan (Enraging the Zionists)
Jihad el-Khazen Al-Hayat - 09/10/06//

About a month has passed since I made my suggestion to popularize the term 'Nazi Zionist' and the derivative 'ZioNazi', and readers are still discussing the matter....
What I say about myself is what I said when I put the term forward on September 5, 2006. I said at the time that the objective of the term was to exasperate the Zionists, because nothing vexes them as much as associating them with the Nazis. I do see the term as an exaggeration, since the crimes of the Nazis against the Jews are greater that the crimes of the Israeli government against the Palestinians and the rest of the Arabs. There is nothing between the Arabs and the Jews that is the equivalent of using gas chambers.

So even though the author knows that the term is ridiculous and has no relationship to truth, the important thing is that it makes Jews angry - and that is a worthwhile goal, in and of itself!

I wonder if he would agree that it would be fair for the West to do the same with Islamists - perhaps we should always refer to Mohammed as "Pedophile Prophet Mohammed" because we know that would upset Islamists, and in some strange universe that is considered a Good Thing to do. (Not to mention that it is probably a whole lot more accurate than "ZioNazi.")

Or is he proposing rules to the game that only one side has to adhere to?

Nah, that couldn't be the case.

(Why am I not surprised that one of the major advertisers in this website is NPR International?)

Righteous Arab Gentiles

In January, I highlighted an article about Muslims in Albania, Turkey and elsewhere who saved Jews from the Holocaust.

Today's Washington Post has an similar important article about the heroic Arabs who saved Jews from being murdered in the 1940s, as well as those who collaborated with the Nazis:

The Holocaust's Arab Heroes

By Robert Satloff
Sunday, October 8, 2006; B01

Virtually alone among peoples of the world, Arabs appear to have won a free pass when it comes to denying or minimizing the Holocaust. Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah has declared to his supporters that "Jews invented the legend of the Holocaust." Syrian President Bashar al-Assad recently told an interviewer that he doesn't have "any clue how [Jews] were killed or how many were killed." And Hamas's official Web site labels the Nazi effort to exterminate Jews "an alleged and invented story with no basis."

Such Arab viewpoints are not exceptional. A respected Holocaust research institution recently reported that Egypt, Qatar and Saudi Arabia all promote Holocaust denial and protect Holocaust deniers. The records of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum show that only one Arab leader at or near the highest level of government -- a young prince from a Persian Gulf state -- has ever made an official visit to the museum in its 13-year history. Not a single official textbook or educational program on the Holocaust exists in an Arab country. In Arab media, literature and popular culture, Holocaust denial is pervasive and legitimized.

Yet when Arab leaders and their people deny the Holocaust, they deny their own history as well -- the lost history of the Holocaust in Arab lands. It took me four years of research -- scouring dozens of archives and conducting scores of interviews in 11 countries -- to unearth this history, one that reveals complicity and indifference on the part of some Arabs during the Holocaust, but also heroism on the part of others who took great risks to save Jewish lives.

Neither Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial to Holocaust victims, nor any other Holocaust memorial has ever recognized an Arab rescuer. It is time for that to change. It is also time for Arabs to recall and embrace these episodes in their history. That may not change the minds of the most radical Arab leaders or populations, but for some it could make the Holocaust a source of pride, worthy of remembrance -- rather than avoidance or denial.

The Holocaust was an Arab story, too. From the beginning of World War II, Nazi plans to persecute and eventually exterminate Jews extended throughout the area that Germany and its allies hoped to conquer. That included a great Arab expanse, from Casablanca to Tripoli and on to Cairo, home to more than half a million Jews.

Though Germany and its allies controlled this region only briefly, they made substantial headway toward their goal. From June 1940 to May 1943, the Nazis, their Vichy French collaborators and their Italian fascist allies applied in Arab lands many of the precursors to the Final Solution. These included not only laws depriving Jews of property, education, livelihood, residence and free movement, but also torture, slave labor, deportation and execution.

There were no death camps, but many thousands of Jews were consigned to more than 100 brutal labor camps, many solely for Jews. Recall Maj. Strasser's warning to Ilsa, the wife of the Czech underground leader, in the 1942 film "Casablanca": "It is possible the French authorities will find a reason to put him in the concentration camp here." Indeed, the Arab lands of Algeria and Morocco were the site of the first concentration camps ever liberated by Allied troops.

About 1 percent of Jews in North Africa (4,000 to 5,000) perished under Axis control in Arab lands, compared with more than half of European Jews. These Jews were lucky to be on the southern shores of the Mediterranean, where the fighting ended relatively early and where boats -- not just cattle cars -- would have been needed to take them to the ovens in Europe. But if U.S. and British troops had not pushed Axis forces from the African continent by May 1943, the Jews of Algeria, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia and perhaps even Egypt and Palestine almost certainly would have met the same fate as those in Europe.

The Arabs in these lands were not too different from Europeans: With war waging around them, most stood by and did nothing; many participated fully and willingly in the persecution of Jews; and a brave few even helped save Jews.

Arab collaborators were everywhere. These included Arab officials conniving against Jews at royal courts, Arab overseers of Jewish work gangs, sadistic Arab guards at Jewish labor camps and Arab interpreters who went house to house with SS officers pointing out where Jews lived. Without the help of local Arabs, the persecution of Jews would have been virtually impossible.

Were Arabs, then under the domination of European colonialists, merely following orders? An interviewer once posed that question to Harry Alexander, a Jew from Leipzig, Germany, who survived a notoriously harsh French labor camp at Djelfa, in the Algerian desert. "No, no, no!" he exploded in reply. "Nobody told them to beat us all the time. Nobody told them to chain us together. Nobody told them to tie us naked to a post and beat us and to hang us by our arms and hose us down, to bury us in the sand so our heads should look up and bash our brains in and urinate on our heads. . . . No, they took this into their own hands and they enjoyed what they did."

But not all Arabs joined with the European-spawned campaign against the Jews. The few who risked their lives to save Jews provide inspiration beyond their numbers.

Arabs welcomed Jews into their homes, guarded Jews' valuables so Germans could not confiscate them, shared with Jews their meager rations and warned Jewish leaders of coming SS raids. The sultan of Morocco and the bey of Tunis provided moral support and, at times, practical help to Jewish subjects. In Vichy-controlled Algiers, mosque preachers gave Friday sermons forbidding believers from serving as conservators of confiscated Jewish property. In the words of Yaacov Zrivy, from a small town near Sfax, Tunisia, "The Arabs watched over the Jews."

I found remarkable stories of rescue, too. In the rolling hills west of Tunis, 60 Jewish internees escaped from an Axis labor camp and banged on the farm door of a man named Si Ali Sakkat, who courageously hid them until liberation by the Allies. In the Tunisian coastal town of Mahdia, a dashing local notable named Khaled Abdelwahhab scooped up several families in the middle of the night and whisked them to his countryside estate to protect one of the women from the predations of a German officer bent on rape.

And there is strong evidence that the most influential Arab in Europe -- Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the rector of the Great Mosque of Paris -- saved as many as 100 Jews by having the mosque's administrative personnel give them certificates of Muslim identity, with which they could evade arrest and deportation. These men, and others, were true heroes.

According to the Koran: "Whoever saves one life, saves the entire world." This passage echoes the Talmud's injunction, "If you save one life, it is as if you have saved the world."

Arabs need to hear these stories -- both of heroes and of villains. They especially need to hear them from their own teachers, preachers and leaders. If they do, they may respond as did that one Arab prince who visited the Holocaust museum. "What we saw today," he commented after his tour, "must help us change evil into good and hate into love and war into peace."

rsatloff@washingtoninstitute.org

Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is author of "Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach into Arab Lands" (PublicAffairs).

As with the Europeans, there were evil Arabs, indifferent Arabs and a small amount of heroic Arabs. We must not forget the good ones just as we must not forget the evil ones.

You need a scorecard

At least one Fatah terrorist was killed when a bomb prematurely exploded in an arms smuggling tunnel.

Another Fatah terrorist was shot and killed (and two Hamas terrorists critically injured) in PalArab infighting.

A young man shot and killed near Al-Masri (from a PalArab Arabic newspaper.)

Our PalArab self-death count is now at 103.

Unfortunately, it is unlikely that I will know if the Hamas terrorists die, so as always I am erring on the side of confirmed dead PalArabs.
Chol HaMoed update:

On Friday, 6 October 2006, 3 masked gunmen opened fire at Mohammed ‘Adnan ‘Atiya, 26, near his house in al-Tannour neighborhood in the east of Rafah. ‘Atiya was wounded by several live bullets to the abdomen and the legs. He was evacuated to the hospital, but he died soon. No more information has been available concerning the reasons of this crime.

At approximately 11:45 on Thursday, 5 October 2006, a number of gunmen traveling in a civilian car (a white Peugeot 504) opened fire into the air for no apparent reason in al-Hawaja Streets in the center of Jabalya refugee camp, and then escaped. As a result, two children were wounded:

1. ‘Essam Musleh al-Maqadma, 6, wounded by a live bullet to the buttock; and

2. Ahmed Nabeel ‘Ali, 12, wounded by a live bullet to the right foot.

And here's a case where the PalArabs will undoubtedly consider the victim to be a martyr - but he fits our definition of a PalArab self-death:

A Palestinian man was shot and killed near the West Bank city of Nablus Sunday afternoon on his way to break the Ramadan fast with family, relatives said.

Relatives said Ahmed Yousef Tirawi, 25, was walking with his wife on a path off limits to Palestinians when soldiers fired a single bullet to his head, killing him.

The Israel Defense Forces said it was unaware of any shooting incident in the area and its forces had not opened fire.
So we are at 105.

UPDATE 2: 106.

Also on Thursday, medical sources at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City declared that Ussama Ahmed al-Shiekh ‘Eid, 24, a member of the Executive Force, died from an injury he had sustained on Monday, 2 October 2006. Al-Sheikh ‘Eid was injured by a live bullet to the abdomen during clashes between the Executive Force and members of Fatah movement, which left dead two civilians and injured 25 others.

"Queer Rite of Jews"

One of the fascinating parts of looking through old newspapers is seeing how Jews were described in the American press in the 1800s and early 1900s. Invariably, they are looked upon as being quaint "others" but not as a part of real America.

The descriptions of Sukkot are a good case in point:

Other articles are somewhat more accurate:

And sometimes you see something a little more interesting:

חג שמח

Muslims riot! A brief survey.

I once came up with a short list of bizarre things that Muslims have rioted over in the past.

Here are a few more:

Source: Associated Press
Moslems angered by a short story they consider insulting to the Prophet Mohammed rioted for a third day today in Karnataka state, and police said they shot and killed one rioter. Police gunfire has killed at least 16 people since Sunday during protests over a fictional story in the largest English- language newspaper in the southern state.

Published on December 9, 1986, Page 6C, San Jose Mercury News (CA)

The Washington Post, Times Herald (1959-1973) - Washington, D.C.
Date: May 19, 1962

The American Consulate at Peshawar, Pakistan, was damaged yesterday by a mob demonstrating against reported plans of a U.S.-Italian movie firm to make a film of the life of Mohammed, the State Department reported.

Reuters
Jerusalem Post
04-06-1997
KUALA LUMPUR - Police detained about 250 anti-Israeli protesters on Friday after demonstrating against the presence of an Israeli cricket team in predominantly Moslem Malaysia.

Riot police used tear gas, water cannon and batons against 500 demonstrators when they refused to disperse after shouting anti-Israeli slogans for an hour at Malaya University, where a match between Israel and Argentina was to take place.

The demonstrators from the opposition Malaysia Islamic Party (PAS) hurled stones and wood when police fired tear gas canisters and sprayed the crowd ...

The Washington Post
Date: Nov 17, 1936
Beirut, Syria, Nov. 16 (AP). -- At least three persons were killed and more than a score reported injured today in a series of clashes between Moslems and Christians over the new treaty between France and Lebanon.

Moslems Riot On Bombay's First Dry Day
55 Persons Injured
Hindus Stoned
10 P.M. Curfew Ordered
The Washington Post
Date: Aug 2, 1939

Bombay, India, Aug. 1. -- The Bombay government tonight imposed a 10 p.m. curfew for 14 days in an effort to prevent further violence following today's riots in which 55 persons were injured in fighting over the new prohibition law.

Syrians in Israeli prisons sending telegrams to Syria?

In an incoherent article from Syria's "news" agency, celebrating their "victory" in the Yom Kippur War (you know, the victory where Israel went past the purple line and took Syrian territory, shelling Damascus), we are told:

DAMASCUS, (SANA) - Captives of the occupied Arab Syrian Golan sent on Thursday a cable of congratulation to President Bashar al-Assad on October war for liberation in which they depicted it as "the greatest world war."

Life must be rough in those Zionist gulags where prisoners can write and publish any propaganda they feel like.

Ronnie Kasrils makes an idiot out of himself again

We revisit the case of the South African Minister of Intelligence [sic] , Ronnie Kasrils:

RONNIE KASRILS says young Jewish people should not just listen to their parents’ stories about Israel.

The Minister of Intelligence, who said he was proud of his Jewish origin but considers himself an atheist, said young Jews should learn the history and facts about what really happened in the Jewish state.

He said the wall built recently by Israel to cut off the Gaza strip was worse than the Berlin Wall because it was three times as high and it was longer (160km).

I agree wholeheartedly that young Jewish people should learn the facts about Israel. For example, the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip is only 51 km long.