Tuesday, December 19, 2006

  • Tuesday, December 19, 2006
  • Elder of Ziyon
Two articles from Wafa (autotranslated):
Workers in the building of the General Intelligence Service, north of the city of Gaza and the population around the place today, appealed to citizens go to the place and the work of a human wall to protect (those) trapped in the building.

One of the officers present at the scene said the executive elements of the force and members of the "Hamas" armed with weapons and mortars surround the building in preparation for the bombing, pointing out that more than 150 persons working trapped in the building. (13:40 GMT)
ـــــــــــــــــ

The sources said that Hamas elements opened fire randomly on women's peaceful march composed of children and women during orientation for the protection of the headquarters of intelligence and the protection of their sons and brothers living in the headquarters. (14.45 GMT)
In other words, some Fatah loyalists were working in the General Intelligence Service headquarters and their wives and children peacefully went there in order to act as human shields from Hamas attack.

Things didn't quite work out as they planned.
  • Tuesday, December 19, 2006
  • Elder of Ziyon
It always amazes me how know-nothing liberals can look at facts and come to such amazingly wrong conclusions.

Here is a column in the Independent (UK) by Johann Hari that describes the Islamic Jew-hating terror in the Palestinian Arab territories - and blames Israel for it all.
I am sitting in a poky bedroom somewhere in Gaza City - I'm not allowed to know where - and opposite me is a huge beaming picture of Osama bin Laden, with the smoke from a burning World Trade Centre forming a black halo around his head. He is surrounded by a gaggle of jihadi angels: some Chechen fighters, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and our own Tube bomber, the Yorkshireman Mohammed Sidique Khan. "Would you like to see our weapons?" a masked jihadi says cheerfully, before thrusting a grenade into my hand.

I have come to see what Israel will confront in a generation if - as now looks certain after this weekend - they never, ever deal with the democratically elected Hamas government, but instead resolve to break it.

Coining one of the dullest clichés about the Middle East, Abba Eban, one of Israel's longest-serving foreign ministers, famously claimed that "the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity". Precisely the opposite is the case. As the Fatah President, Abu Mazen, tried desperately this Saturday to dislodge Hamas by calling for early elections, we need to remember a stark truth. Every time the Israeli government rejects a Palestinian leader because he is too hard-line, they do not get a cuddly Gandhian moderate in his place. They get somebody more hard-line still.
This should be an easy one to fact check. Let's look at Palestinian Arab elected leaders: Arafat, Abbas, Haniyeh. I'm glad we have intellectuals like Hari who can draw a straight line though those and find that Abbas was worse than Arafat.
Yasser Arafat endorsed a two-state solution, but couldn't accept a forever-and-always string of Bantustans bisected by Israeli settler-only roads as his half of the deal - so they rocketed and shelled the old man's compound until he died.
Don't remind Hari about what Israel really offered nor about that pesky intifada that has been raging for six years now. Nope....Israel just killed Arafat because he was such a peaceful person.
Many Israelis now look back on Arafat with near-nostalgia. Today the Hamas Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh, says he can never accept Israel's existence. But he is offering a 40-year-long hudna (ceasefire) - provided Israel withdraws to the internationally recognised 1967 borders, as they should anyway under international law.
Hari fails to mention that UN 242 says no such thing. He fails to mention that the pre-1967 green line was never a "border" that was internationally recognized; it was an armistice line. He also fails to mention another small condition of this "hudna" - Israel's allowing millions ofPalestiniann Arabs to settle in Israel proper, thus destroying Israel.

No, all Hari sees is how great Hamas is for offering Israel peace in return for Israel's destruction. Is he being obtuse or is he being a purposeful liar?
Haniyeh is offering to kick all the tough issues down the road until 2046, and build two peacefully co-existing states, with no mutual violence. His track record of keeping his word on ceasefires is strong: in the current short hudna, Hamas has held its fire even as Fatah fires a few Qassam missiles.
Yes, let's look at Hamas' wonderful track record of keeping truces, shall we?

Notice also how Hari has gone from saying that Fatah is more moderate than Hamas in the third paragraph to now saying that Hamas is more interested in peace.
But the governments of America, Europe and Israel are snubbing this deal too. They say Haniyeh has to recognise Israel totally, and today. Until he does, his people will be "put on a diet", in the words of one Israeli government adviser. I have seen what this means: hospitals shut and shuttered across the West Bank, with women left to give birth at home like pre-modern peasants. The yellowish hue of malnutrition on children's faces. The empty and echoing schools.
Here he is just lying. The "shuttered schools" were because of a strike in September and October. No one is dying of malnutrition and hundreds of millions of dollars in aid gets through to Gaza from NGOs.

Also notice how he dismisses as absurd the idea that Hamas recognize Israel. Somehow, the fact that the PA did officially recognize Israel and Hamas is now in charge of the PA doesn't register with Hari - why, asking Hamas to recognize Israel is just crazy talk! Look how many concessions Hamas has done already for peace!
Tony Blair has been at the forefront of this programme to force Hamas to concede, and is in the Middle East to promote it further. For him, the onus is on the Palestinians living under military occupation to justify why they should be freed - rather than on the people who have been oppressing them on their own land for 39 years to explain why it should continue.
Yes, those nasty Israelis, insisting that their neighbors promise not to try to destroy it at every opportunity. How oppressive! Can't they just tear down the wall, invite them into their towns, and blow up with dignity and grace?
The result of breaking the democratic will of the Palestinian people will not be greater softness on their part. No. It will create more men like Abu Ahmad (a nom de guerre), who I sat with last week in the shadow of Bin Laden in a corner of Gaza.
Here yet again we see the fundamental pro-terror bigotry of leftist thinking - that the terrorists have no free will and no responsibility for their actions, and that they are forced into their opinions because of the criminal Western countries. Israel has no right to feel threatened by Arab terrorists but Arab terrorists have every right to terrorize because of Israel's policies.
"I want to kill and kill and kill again. I want to be a killing machine until, inshallah [God willing], I become a martyr," he said, staring at me intensely. He is 27 - my age - and murderous. He has just described how he slashed the throats of four female Israeli soldiers in an illegal settlement in 2002, and he chuckled as he described how they cried for their mothers. "All the Jews have to be killed," he says. The children? The women? "I prefer to kill soldiers, but they must all be killed in time. Soldiers first." The Holocaust did not happen, he says, "but it should have".
So whose fault is this naked Jew-hatred from a terrorist? Do you have to ask?
These crazed young men - the "troops" of Islamic Jihad - are the children of the first Intifada. They saw their parents peacefully protest, and the Israeli troops be ordered to "break their bones" as punishment. Abu Hamza, a sober, severe 26-year-old, explained he first joined Islamic Jihad when he was 10 - a year after he took his first Israeli bullet in the skull. He had been throwing stones and setting fire to old tyres in the street when it happened, and he became a local celebrity as the first child victim of the violence. "I was so proud," he said. He invited me to feel the scar on the back of his head. "Yes," he said with a smile, "we have been growing in popularity over the past few years. Very much."

All over Gaza and the West Bank, the assault on Hamas is creating groups like this to their right, deranged little pockets that will swell if Hamas is totally humiliated. At the moment, they are small, speaking - as Hamas did a generation ago - for only a small fraction of Palestinians. But for how long?
If only the Palestinian Islamic Jihad wasn't created in the 1970s, one could almost think that Hari knew what he was talking about. (Not to mention that it was an offshoot of the older Egyptian Islamic Jihad.)

Now that we have the theme that Israel is responsible for all Islamic terrorism, we can go to the next step:
Last week I tried to trace the footsteps of a new streak of Islamist fanaticism that has jutted suddenly into Gaza over the past month. A group calling itself Swords of Islam has started blowing up internet cafés - a symbol of extra-Koranic knowledge and cosmopolitan connection to the world. They have issued Talibanist threats warning that women who do not wear the hijab will be "burned", and that the internet is a "Zionist plot" to keep people away from "their religious duties".

In a bombed-out café named Montada Donajoun in the Jaballiya refugee camp, I spoke to the terrified owner. Basa Abu-Jased, 29, said, "Of course women are frightened now. [Even as a man] I am really frightened! I used to sit on the street and talk to women. Now I won't do it. You don't know what's going to happen." Almost everybody on the street was too frightened to speculate about who these people were; one woman suggested they were "maniacs who had returned from fighting in Iraq", but then hurried away.

It took a very long time to rouse the Palestinians to violence and produce these pathologies. Between 1967 and 1982 - as 200,000 Palestinians were expelled and more than one-third of their remaining land was stolen by fanatical settlers - just 282 Israelis were killed by Palestinians.
Didn't Hari ever hear of the airplane hijackings in the 1970s? The Olympic massacre? The other terror attacks? Black September? Oh, sorry, they don't count, because they don't fit the narrative of the peacefully demonstrating Palestinian Arabs that Hari is peddling. Out of scope.

Also, Hari wasn't born then.
But Israeli policies have virtually guaranteed a tip towards great violence and forms of madness. Every time the Palestinians have peacefully protested or negotiated, they have been choked further.
All those Israeli attacks on the territories during Oslo, without a single terror attack back. Right?
There is still - still - a majority in Palestine for peaceful coexistence with Israel, with 67 per cent supporting the Hamas proposal for a 40-year hudna.
Because they know what the offer was, unlike Hari. Notice also how he picks and chooses his polls to ignore any that might, just might, contradict his story of a peaceful Palestinian Arabs people.
But if their democratic will is treated with contempt by humiliating Hamas, this historical window will close.
Yes, Israel and the West must start rewarding Hamas for consistently proclaiming its desire for the destruction of Israel and killing as many Jews as it can, because the alternative is "worse."

And anyone elected democratically is automatically deserving of respect and honor. Unless he is named Bush.

Liberal logic at its finest.
Every year the occupation goes on, more deranged people like Abu Ahmad are smelted. "I love Osama bin Laden," he said to me as we parted, slapping me on the back. "I love killing."
As usual, it is all Israel's fault, so in the end Israel gets what it deserves.

Even the love that Abu Ahmad has for OBL and the Terror All-Stars (way back in the first paragraph) is all because of Israel.

And, by extension, all terror against the West is because of Western policies, and London and Madrid and New York all get what they deserve - it is the same logic, after all, that extremists are created by us. They couldn't possibly be responsible for their own actions, and Islamic extremism and the desire for a shari'a based caliphate and the inability for Islam to confront its own extremists has nothing to do with it.

Right, Johann?
  • Tuesday, December 19, 2006
  • Elder of Ziyon
A 13-year old named Fawzi Issa was killed in Jenin during "regrettable events." It appears to have been during a protest at the killing of another, Saqr Turkmen.

Another kid in Jenin was kidnapped.

In Al-Birah, a PalArab security officer was killed in a drive-by shooting.

Our count of PalArabs violently killed by each other since late June is now at 186.

UPDATES: An Abbas guard killed in Gaza City. 187.
A 19-year old girl named Mustafa Misbah was shot in the neck and killed in Gaza: 188.
Hamdi Rahma, brother of a senior officer in the Palestinian Preventative Security Service, was killed in Jabalya. 189.

News sources are reporting at least 4 killed on Sunday, I only had three - so that's 190.

An Egyptian Palestinian Arab was found dead with a bullet hole in his head in Khan Younis - 191.

Ahmed Zeyada, a 21-year-old Fatah supporter was killed by Hamas Monday night. 192.

Two Fatah members assassinated in their car by Hamas Tuesday morning. And a Hamas member was killed on the Shifa hospital compund in Gaza City. 195.
The Jerusalem Post reports five killed today so far, so that makes 197.

Haaretz says a sixth was killed in its NewsFlash section. 198.
  • Tuesday, December 19, 2006
  • Elder of Ziyon
The final votes for the Weblog Awards have been confirmed and this blog ended up a distant fourth (in the Best Middle Eastern or African Blog category) behind the three heavyweights Sandmonkey, Treppenwitz and Iraq the Model.

Since early on it was obvious that I would be lucky to get 10% of the votes of each of the top three, I had set a joking personal goal to beat The Sudanese Thinker. Inevitably, he saw my challenge and marshalled his forces to pull ahead of me for most of the week.

I gave up "blegging" on Thursday and as of Friday at sundown, I was behind TST by one vote 171-170.

So I was very surprised to see that between then and midnight I somehow gathered another 11 votes and pulled ahead. I guess the East Coast Orthodox crowd isn't my main readership!

So thanks to all of you who voted. Even with 3.22% of the total vote in a relatively minor category it was really an honor to be nominated and chosen as a finalist.

And read The Sudanese Thinker as well!

Monday, December 18, 2006

  • Monday, December 18, 2006
  • Elder of Ziyon
Hamas may be battling Fatah in Gaza;
Sunnis and Christians may be at loggerheads with Hezbollah in Lebanon;
Sunnis and Shiites may be blowing themselves up in Iraq;
The Janjaweed may be slaughtering and raping thousands in the Sudan;

...but if Israel would just award even more land to the PalArabs then everything in the Middle East will be filled with sweetness and light.
  • Monday, December 18, 2006
  • Elder of Ziyon
Palestinian Media Watch caught a column by Mahmoud Al-Habbash for the PA newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadeedah where he blames the Arab leadership squarely for the Palestinian Arabs leaving their homes in 1948.
“…The leaders and the elites promised us at the beginning of the “Catastrophe” [[the establishment of Israel and the creation of refugee problem] in 1948, that the duration of the exile will not be long, and that it will not last more than a few days or months, and afterwards the refugees will return to their homes, which most of them did not leave only until they put their trust in those “Arkuvian” promises made by the leaders and the political elites. Afterwards, days passed, months, years and decades, and the promises were lost with the strain of the succession of events…" [Term "Arkuvian,” is after Arkuv – a figure from Arab tradition - who was known for breaking his promises and for his lies."] ”
I found the column in Arabic (autotranslated) and the writer uses the 1948 experience as a springboard to describe how Arab leaders continue to lie to the Palestinian Arabs even today.

He brings examples:
  • Arab leaders promised to lift the embargo against the Palestinian Arabs and didn't follow through.
  • The Arab governments and Iran promised to give hundreds of millions of dollars that didn't materialize.
  • The PalArab leaders themselves promise to find the murderers of many within the territories, including the murderers of the three kids last week, and nothing ever materializes.
It is a very bitter column that is noteworthy not only in how it portrays 1948 but in the matter-of-fact way it is mentioned, as if every Palestinian Arab knows the real facts behind what happened then - it is only one paragraph in this article and if this was a novel concept for most Palestinian Arabs he would have adduced some proof.
  • Monday, December 18, 2006
  • Elder of Ziyon
From Maariv (Hebrew), translated by Daily Alert:
Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh received a promise from Iran of extensive economic aid, cash, military cooperation, and also good news, from his perspective.
Lower your profile, calm the situation, the Iranians told Haniyeh. In four months we're going to issue a statement that will dramatically change the strategic balance in the Middle East.
According to Israeli intelligence, the Iranians have promised to make an important announcement at the next Persian new year, which begins the third week in March 2007.
A few details are added by the Russian news agency Novosti:
Tehran has announced that it intends to complete its nuclear research program by the Iranian New Year on March 21. This involves the assembly of a cascade of 3,000 centrifuges, which it needs for the commercial stage of uranium enrichment. Russian and foreign experts believe that these centrifuges will enable Iran to create five to seven nuclear charges within 12 months.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has announced plans to receive the first batch of enriched uranium after commissioning 60,000 centrifuges.

The Natanz nuclear facility, where Iran is enriching uranium, is designed to accommodate only 54,000 centrifuges, but experts say that would be enough to create a nuclear bomb within two weeks. They also say the Natanz facility could reach its designed capacity in five to seven years.

Many Russian experts, however, think that Iran is bluffing when it speaks about turning on 3,000 centrifuges in March 2007. It could do this if it has bought the required number of centrifuges, but that is unlikely. Tehran is likely overstating its technical possibilities.

"Iran has made a crucial decision and is moving honorably along its chosen path," Ahmadinejad has said. According to the Iranian president, the people of his country will not only "rebuild Iran and propel it to the pinnacles of success, but will also open the door to freedom for other nations."
Iran's successful completion of a peaceful nuclear program hardly seems to be something that would change the balance of power in the Middle East, nor something that would help Hamas.

It is entirely possible that Iran is bluffing. But the free world seems to be willing to wager millions of Israeli lives on that possibility.

Sunday, December 17, 2006

  • Sunday, December 17, 2006
  • Elder of Ziyon
An unusual video on YouTube.
  • Sunday, December 17, 2006
  • Elder of Ziyon
In the fighting simmering between Fatah and Hamas, don't forget that other major faction of the peaceful Palestinian Arab people - Islamic Jihad, that "other" group that is responsible for a large percentage of terror attacks and that is the current "bad cop" in a situation where the Hamas terrorists can't figure out how to present itself to the West and Fatah pretends to be moderate.

A glance at recent Islamic Jihad statements shows that:
In other words, even if the rapidly fading sanctions against the Hamas government would force Hamas to pretend to recognize Israel, there is still a sizable force that can and will torpedo any movement towards co-existence, no matter how temporary.

Fatah and Hamas are fighting over the leadership of their thoroughly screwed people. No one can imagine a scenario where they would fight Islamic Jihad over their terrorist attacks - the "heroism" of shooting rockets and sending suicide bombers is something that is fundamentally agreed upon by all Palestinian Arab factions.

(It is notable that a Nazareth-based British "journalist," Jonathan Cook, who writes not only for the usual assortment of ultra-left rags like Counterpunch but also for the Guardian, just wrote an article praising Hamas for not agreeing to recognize Israel. He is trying mightily to make Islamic Jihad's goals acceptable for the mainstream.)

Even the most liberal wishful-thinker, who pretends that a Hamas in power will become peaceful, who pretends that new Palestinian Arab elections will bring a responsible government, who pretends that Oslo and the Roadmap are still alive and are bases for peace - even that person needs to come up with a creative way to wish Islamic Jihad away.

And so far, no one has.

Saturday, December 16, 2006

  • Saturday, December 16, 2006
  • Elder of Ziyon
Your tax dollars at work...from a State Department website.

Muslim-American Rappers Promote Tolerance in Middle East

Native Deen hip-hop group energizes Palestinian youth in Jerusalem
By Carolee Walker
USINFO Staff Writer
Enlarge Photo
Muslim-American rappers Abdul Malik, Joshua Salaam and Naeem Muhammad
Muslim-American rappers Abdul Malik, Joshua Salaam and Naeem Muhammad of Native Deen perform in Jerusalem. (photo: Native Deen)
Washington – When Native Deen took hip-hop music to Jerusalem in fall 2006, the group of Muslim-American rappers was moved deeply by the holiness of the place and the energy of the hundreds of teens who attended their concerts. Yet nothing came close to the connection the performers felt to their faith during their Middle East trip.

“I could feel it in the stone and the rocks,” said Naeem Muhammad of Native Deen, a Muslim-American hip-hop group based near Washington that has a strong following in the United Kingdom and the United States.

“Our music inspires Muslims to be better Muslims, but it also gives other people a better view of our faith,” Joshua Salaam told USINFO in an interview.

The rhythm is there, and the beat is contemporary. But the heart of inspirational hip-hop music is in the powerful rap lyrics coaxing listeners to live better lives and be better people.

Native Deen traveled to Turkey, Dubai, the Palestinian Territories and Israel on behalf of the U.S. Department of State, incorporating the teachings of Islam into songs about respect and humanity. At all the concerts, the performers were greeted like “American superstars,” they said. In Dubai, Native Deen won the 2006 Mahabba Award at an event showcasing musicians, artists and filmmakers inspired to spread Islam through art.

The group, founded in 2000, is known for its positive energy, use of traditional percussion and lyrics focused on tolerance and the teachings of Islam.

“We use the Quran as a source of guidance for us when we write our songs,” said Abdul Malik. “We use the morals and guidelines that we find in the Quran to teach people and to guide people.” This means that the beat, or rhythm, comes second, according to Salaam. The lyrics are the most important aspect of the song, so in Native Deen’s sound, the rap is always in front of the percussion.

“Deen” is the Arabic word for “religion,” or way of life.

While I didn't see anything explicitly offensive in the lyrics, it is clear that the "tolerance" mentioned is only teaching others tolerance for Islam, not teaching Muslims tolerance for other religions or ways of life. In many ways the lyrics are proselytizing, which is a questionable activity for the State Department to be promoting:

He (satan) wants to bring you down, he whispers everyday
You started on the path and he led you astray
I know you will come back, you never feel at peace
You're searching for the truth to put your mind at ease
You know you're missing me, I know what you've been through
When we meet again, we have a lot of work to do

I am the Deen you know
I am the Deen you need
I am the Deen you love
Please come back to me

Your life had just begun, I helped to raise you up
You thought it'd be easy but your life turned out to be rough
You thought I let you down, I never let you go
I'm worried ‘cause you left me and you didn't even know
You know you're gonna die, who knows when that will be
Before you meet Allah you should come back to me

I am the Deen you know
I am the Deen you need
I am the Deen you love
Please come back to me

People coming back, People coming back To Islam, people are coming to this Deen
To Islam, you are invited to this Deen


The leader of the band has a blog where he tries hard not to publicize his true feelings:
We are in Palestine now. I will have to keep this blog short before I start to get heated and make some political statements that will get Native Deen arrested.

All in all, this is something that raises questions about what exactly the State Department is intending with this sponsorship.

Friday, December 15, 2006

  • Friday, December 15, 2006
  • Elder of Ziyon
As my readers know, I have been scouring PalArab press and websites looking for accurate statistics on how many Palestinian Arabs are killed by each other, and I have been keeping my own count since late June.

Very few of the murders I've uncovered were of supposed "collaborators" with Israel. While we know that Palestinian Arabs actually trying to reduce terror is a capital crime in PA-land (along with the even more heinous crime of selling land to Jews), not too many of these murders have been reported.

But the BBC recently had an article on "collaborators" that includes this astonishing statistic:
According to a Palestinian human rights group, Adel Ahmed's experience is increasingly common.

Amid the growing chaos in the West Bank, it estimates that approximately one person a day is killed having been accused of collaborating.

No-one has been arrested following any of these killings and many Palestinians say that the charges are normally false.

However, with the breakdown in law and order, the accusation has become the excuse for revenge and bloodletting.
One murder a day for collaboration? I see clan clashes, intra-PalArab security fighting, honor killings and the ever-fun work accidents, but are these people all being killed silently?

And which "human rights" organization is saying this? I follow about six of them, and have not come across any statistics of this type.

Let's give these guys a state!

UPDATE: The "Palestine Center for Human Rights" just published a position paper in which, while they do not support the death penalty, they clearly say that any Palestinian Arab who collaborates with Israel is deserving of sever pubishment, and that they opposed the Oslo agreements where collaborators would not be punished.

In other words, this twisted "human rights" organization is telling the Palestinian people that if they know about a terror attack that is imminent that is aimed against Jews, they should not under any circumstances inform Israel to allow her to defend herself and her citizens.

How can a "human rights" organization have such a twisted view of morality?

When it doesn't consider Israeli Jews to be "human," of course!
  • Friday, December 15, 2006
  • Elder of Ziyon
Another indication that the "boycott" is crumbling without any concessions on the PalArab side:
RAMALLAH, West Bank, Dec 13 (Reuters) - The European Union will consider making direct payments to Palestinian policemen who have gone without full salaries since Hamas took power in March, an EU aid chief said on Wednesday.

But Hans Duynhouwer, head of the EU programme that provides aid to low-wage Palestinian workers, played down the chances of the EU agreeing to pay security services across the board as requested by President Mahmoud Abbas.

Duynhouwer said it was "a sensitive issue and the EU was not enthusiastic about it".

Abbas asked the EU to expand its so-called Temporary International Mechanism (TIM) to include roughly 80,000 members of the security services, including the police force.

"We have been asked to consider the possibility of making a possible payment of police in blue civil protection and this will be taken up next year," Duynhouwer told Reuters in the West Bank city of Ramallah. "It is difficult to foresee the extension to all security services, but extending it to all civil servants is an option that could be considered."

Abbas aide Saeb Erekat said the president was facing a serious problem because his presidential guard and other members of the security services had gone without salaries since March, when a U.S.-led economic blockade was imposed on the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority.

"We are facing a very big and serious problem. We have asked the TIM to extend the mechanism to include the presidential guard and security services," Erekat said. The EU created the aid mechanism in June as a way to deliver aid directly to Palestinians working in critical sectors, like health care, without providing the money to the Hamas-led government.

The mechanism has been expanded to pay 70,000 low-income public sector employees and pensioners. The security services, and civil servants with salaries higher than $600, have been excluded.

The EU aid mechanism has so far provided "allowances" to Palestinians totalling more than 112 million euros ($148 million). EU officials say it has provided access to water, health services and sanitation for 1.3 million Palestinians and paid allowances to around a million people.
So instead of telling the PA that there is no way their terrorist-moonlighting "police" would get a dime from the civilized world, Hans Duynhouwer empowers Hamas by saying that if it can just hang on to power a bit more, the EU will be happy to fill in the gaps in its budget.

See this previous post.

Thursday, December 14, 2006

  • Thursday, December 14, 2006
  • Elder of Ziyon
The idea of an independent Palestinian Arab state just keeps getting better and better all the time, doesn't it?
GAZA - Gunmen opened fire on Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ismail Haniya’s convey late Thursday at the Rafah border crossing, killing a bodyguard and wounding five others including Haniya’s oldest son, medics and government officials said.

The violence capped a day of chaos at the Rafah crossing, where Haniya waited most of the day to enter from Egypt to Gaza, carrying a 35 million dollars in cash.

Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Mahmoud Al Zahar blamed the attack on militants from the rival Fatah movement of President Mahmoud Abbas.

Palestinian eyewitnesses said that militants guarding Haniya’s convoy fired first on Abbas’ own security officials, who guard and secure the Rafah crossing. The witnesses said the presidential guards responded to the sources of fire, where one of Haniya’s bodyguards was slain, and five others wounded including Abul Sallam Haniya.

Added to yesterday's killing of a terror judge, and our count of PalArabs killed by each other since late June is now at 183.

Meanwhile, the nascent civil war inches forward. Wafa/Arabic reports:
No wonder every Palestinian Arab with a brain in his head is getting the hell out, leaving behind a higher percentage of people who enjoy and are addicted to violence.
  • Thursday, December 14, 2006
  • Elder of Ziyon
Omri writes that Olmert's faux pas is not a big deal, and that it makes sense for Israel to be a bit more explicit about her nuclear capabilities. While I'm not sure I agree with him (why should Israel invite international pressure to sign the NPT?) there is merit in the argument.

But that's not what bothered me about Olmert's statement.

What bothered me was that this was almost certainly not meant as a veiled threat to Iran nor as a well-planned signal to the world. It was simply a boneheaded slip of the tongue, something that a supposed head of state should not be doing.

We have an Israeli government that seems to have lost all sense of strategy or purpose. It stumbles from one crisis to the next, in reactive mode, mouthing the words that have been said for decades and then doing the opposite. It is filled with incompetence and opportunism. Above all, it exudes weakness.

This government seems to have brought the Israeli people into a malaise comparable to Americans under Carter. (Its current Supreme Court is not helping matters.)

Every day that Israelis are subjected to the blustering rule of Olmert is another day of losing their confidence. And one must not underestimate the importance of the people's will.

Israel deserves a leader. Olmert's French interview proves yet again that he is not that person.
  • Thursday, December 14, 2006
  • Elder of Ziyon
A few days ago it was reported that a Palestinian Arab terrorist who was imprisoned by Israel for 18 years before his release this year wrote a letter to Iran's president , telling him that his Holocaust-denial is wrong. Here is the text of the letter in English. While I am not thrilled with some of the wording, at least it shows that some Arabs still have the ability to think.
Other Victims of Denial
by Mahmoud Al-Safadi

Mr. President, I write to you following the announcement of your intention to organize a conference on the Holocaust in Teheran on 11-12 December, and I sincerely hope that this letter will be brought to your attention.

First of all, allow me to introduce myself: Mahmoud Al-Safadi, a former prisoner from occupied Jerusalem. I was released less than three months ago from the Israeli prison where I had been locked up for eighteen years for having been a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and having taken an active part in resistance to the occupation during the first Intifada. Since you were elected president, I have followed your declarations with great interest -- in particular those relating to the Holocaust. I respect your opposition to the American and Western injunctions concerning the Iranian nuclear program and believe it legitimate that you complain of the double standard that the world has with regard to the nuclear development of certain regimes.

But I am furious about your insistence on claiming that the Holocaust never took place and about your doubts about the number of Jews who were murdered in the extermination and concentration camps, organized massacres, and gas chambers, consequently denying the universal historical significance of the Nazi period.

Allow me to say, Mr. President, with all due respect to you, that you made these statements without really knowing the Nazi industry of death. To have read the works of some deniers seems to be enough for you -- a little like a man who shouts above a well and hears only the echo of his own voice. I believe that a man in your position should not make such an enormous error, because it could be turned against him and, worse still, his people.

Like you and millions of people in the world -- among whom, alas, are innumerable Palestinians and Arabs -- I was also convinced that the Jews exaggerated and lied about the Holocaust, etc., even apart from the fact that the Zionist movement and Israel use the Holocaust to justify their policy, first of all against my own people.

My long imprisonment provided me with the occasion to read books and articles that our ideology and social norms made inaccessible to us outside the prison. These documents gave me a thorough knowledge of the history of the Nazi regime and genocide that it perpetrated. At the beginning of the 1990s, by reading articles written by the Palestinian intellectuals Edward Said and Azmi Bishara, I discovered facts and positions which contradicted mine and those of many Palestinians. Their writings having piqued my curiosity and given birth inside me to the need to know more, I set about reading accounts of survivors of the Holocaust and the Nazi occupation. These testimonies were written by people of various nationalities, Jews or non-Jews.

The more I learned, the more I realized that the Holocaust was indeed a historical fact and the more I became aware of the monumental dimension of the crime committed by Nazi Germany against the Jews, other social and national groups, and humanity in general. I discovered that Nazi Germany aspired to found a "new world order" dominated by the "pure Aryan race" thanks to the physical annihilation of "impure races" and the enslavement of other nations. I discovered that various "normal" official institutions -- bureaucracies, judicial systems, medical and educational authorities, municipalities, railroad companies, and others -- had taken part and collaborated in the implementation of this new world order. From a theoretical point of view, this objective, just like the victories won at the time by the Nazi armies of occupation, threatened the existence of the Arabs and Muslims as well.

Whatever the number of victims -- Jewish and non-Jewish -- the crime is monumental. Any attempt to deny it deprives the denier of his own humanity and sends him immediately to the side of torturers. Whoever denies the fact that this human disaster really took place should not be astonished that others deny the sufferings and persecutions inflicted on his own people by tyrannical leaders or foreign occupiers. Ask yourself, I beg you, the following question: were hundreds of thousands of testimonies written about death camps, gas chambers, ghettos, and mass murders committed by the German army, tens of thousands of works of research based on German documents, numerous filmed sequences, some of which were shot by German soldiers -- were all these masses of evidence completely fabricated?

Can all that be summed up simply as an imperialist-Zionist plot? Are the confessions of high-ranking Nazis officials about their personal role in the project of extermination of whole nations only the fruit of the imagination of some disturbed spirit?

And all these heroic deeds of the people subjected to the German occupation -- the first among whom were Russians, Polish, and Yugoslavs -- only lies and gross exaggerations? Could the struggle of the Soviets against Nazi Germany be only a phantasm? The Russians continue to celebrate their victory over Nazi Germany and remember millions of their civilian and military compatriots who lost their lives in this struggle. Are they lying, too?

I invite you to read historical studies and serious testimonies before making your public statements. You divide the world in two camps: the imperialists-Zionists, who manufactured the myth of the Holocaust, and the adversaries of imperialism, who know the truth and uncover the plot. Perhaps you think that the act of denying the Holocaust places you at the vanguard of the Muslim world and that this refusal constitutes a useful tool in the combat against American imperialism and Western hegemony. By doing so, you actually do great disservice to popular struggles the world over.

At best, you cover your people and yourself with ridicule in the eyes of political forces who reject imperialism but cannot take your ideas and arguments seriously, due to the fact that you obsessively deny the existence of an abundantly documented and studied historical period whose consequences are still felt and discussed today.

At worst, you discourage and weaken the political, social, and intellectual forces who, in Europe and in the United States, reject the policy of confrontation and war carried out by George Bush, but are forced to conclude that you, too, jeopardize the world by your declarations denying the genocide and by your nuclear program.

Concerning the struggle of my people for their independence and their freedom: perhaps do you regard the negation of the Holocaust as an expression of support for the Palestinians? There, again, you are mistaken. We fight for our existence and our rights and against the historical injustice which was inflicted on us in 1948. We will not win our victory and our independence by denying the genocide perpetrated against the Jewish people, even though the forces who occupy our country today and dispossess us are part of the Jewish people.
This letter implies how difficult it is for Arabs to even have a clue about real world history, as the Arabic literature on secular topics is very sparse. This is a tragedy that is usually overlooked - a billion people who only can read one language are imprisoned by the non-existence of any ideas that are not politically-correct for the Arab world. The UN had a report on this in 2003 that looked at this problem in detail but it watered down the pertinent facts sprinkled among its 217 pages:
Curricula and education methodologies
Typically, educational material is contained in
the curriculum, which comprises a body of
lessons that is ideally a synthesis of the best of
what decision-makers and authors agree to be
worthwhile and necessary for the learning
process. In purely formal terms, curricula in
most Arab countries do not appear to be
greatly different from what many countries
around the world are adopting.
During the last decade several Arab countries
have embarked on educational reform
programmes that concentrate particularly on
revising and making modifications to the content
of curricula and syllabi.

When it comes to
the sciences, content is not usually a controversial
matter, save for some themes that are
perceived to touch on religious beliefs such as
the theory of evolution or on social taboos,
such as sex education. But the humanities and
social sciences that have a direct relevance to
people’s ideas and convictions are supervised
or protected by the authorities in charge of designing
curricula and issuing schoolbooks.
Consequently, such subjects usually laud past
achievements and generally indulge in both
self-praise and blame of others, with the aim of
instilling loyalty, obedience and support for
the regime in power. It is not unusual to find
schoolbooks in many Arab countries with a
picture of the ruler on the front page, even in
the case of textbooks in neutral subjects such
as science and mathematics.

Some researchers argue that the curricula
taught in Arab countries seem to encourage
submission, obedience, subordination and
compliance, rather than free critical thinking.
In many cases, the contents of these curricula
do not stimulate students to criticise political
or social axioms. Instead, they smother their
independent tendencies and creativity (Munir
Bashour, background paper for AHDR 2).

Generally speaking, the assigned curricula,
starting from preliminary school or even
before, embody a concept that views education
as an industrial production process,
where curricula and their content serve as
moulds into which fresh minds are supposed
to be poured.

There are various means for conveying information:
lectures, seminars, workshops, collaborative
work, laboratory work and many
others. In Arab countries, however, lectures
seem to dominate. Students can do little but
memorise, recite and perfect rote learning.
The most widely used instruments are schoolbooks,
notes, sheets or summaries.
Communication in education is didactic, supported
by set books containing indisputable
texts in which knowledge is objectified so as to
hold incontestable facts, and by an examination
process that only tests memorisation and
factual recall.

I couldn't find it in the report, I've seen reported that the number of books translated into Arabic over the past millennium is about 10,000, the same number that are translated into Spanish annually.

Arab rulers are so consumed with power that they are starving their people of the ability to think, which is why creatures like Ahmadinejad have the opportunity to brainwash hundreds of millions of people.

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