Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, August 13, 2006

Olmert: criminally incompetent

I am generally very loathe to criticize any Israeli government from my comfortable place in the Diaspora, but I simply cannot see much at all that is positive about how the current Israeli government has handled the situation in Lebanon.

The war itself seems to have been waged incompetently. From the beginning, Israel had no clear strategy and pulled its punches. It changed its stated goals daily. Any war where one eye is on the battlefield and the other eye on worrying about world opinion is a war with no depth perception and no consistency.

The UN resolution is yet another worthless document that sounds OK in theory and will be a disaster in practice. The fact that the operative parts of the resolution ignore the Israeli captives is only the tip of the iceberg.

The resolution is heavily dependent on a useless Lebanese army, which is itself sympathetic to terrorists and views Israel as the enemy, not Hezbollah. It also allows the UN to define what defensive actions Israel is allowed to take - meaning Israel has no chance to defend itself.

And if Olmert already supported the very flawed cease-fire, why on earth did he choose the weekend after the UN vote to finally expand the operation in Lebanon - when gaining a strategic foothold becomes almost moot? Why did 24 Israeli soldiers have to die yesterday?

Olmert seems to represent more the pointy-haired boss of Dilbert than a real leader.

James Zogby, Hypocrite

"Best of the Web Today" has a couple of quotes from James Zogby, of the Arab American Institute, blaming Israel wholly for Lebanese civilian deaths:

Cooper: Jim, do you deny that Hezbollah uses civilians or at least, you know, works among and/or hides among women and children?
Zogby: The resistance movement in south Lebanon, I haven't supported the tactics that they've used in the bombings that they've participated in. I cannot see the Israelis attempting to justify the carpet bombing of many areas of Lebanon as continuing to say that they're simply targeting Hezbollah.....
Cooper: Jim, though, I mean, does Hezbollah bear any of the responsibility for any of the civilian casualties?
Zogby: I've said from the beginning that their behavior was reckless and provocative. But Israel bears the responsibility. It's like saying what Mort is saying and what those who want to make that case is saying, the girl who wore the short skirt deserved to get raped--

Now, his logic is abhorrent and offensive, but the only way you can justify Zogby's claim that Hezbollah has no responsibility for the deaths of civilians it is hiding behind is if you claim that the party doing an action is wholly responsible for that action. (Obviously even that is ridiculous, as one cannot compare the morality of purposeful acts with those of inadvertant acts. Beyond that, it completely ignores the fact that Hezbollah started this war.) The only way this makes sense is to assume in this case this is his position - that each action occurs in a vacuum and must be judged as such.

So, one would assume that Zogby would be equally adamant that Palestinian Arabs are wholly responsible for their terror acts, right? That they should be judged in a vacuum, right? Riiiiiiiiight....

ZAHN: Mr. Zogby, how much responsibility do you think Yasser Arafat should bear for the ongoing troubles in the Middle East?

ZOGBY: Well, listen, it's -- we live in a kind of an "Alice in Wonderland" world here, where Ariel Sharon is the man of peace and Arafat becomes the obstacle to peace. We've lionized one and demonized the other, and I simply don't think this picture is accurate. The man has flaws...

ZAHN: But you didn't answer the question. OK, he has...

ZOGBY: The man has flaws. There's no question about it. But remember, they were negotiating up to Taba, right before Ariel Sharon was elected, and they came awful close. It was Barak who pulled his people back. And frankly, I believe that if this administration in Washington had continued to push and if Ariel Sharon had continued the negotiations, we'd probably have a peace settlement by now.

I don't believe that the process fell apart for the reasons that this mythic-historic narrative that Israel constructed is, in fact, right. I think the Palestinians wanted -- Arafat wanted a two-state solution on the West Bank, Gaza with East Jerusalem as a capital. And frankly, the Israelis just weren't willing to give it, and they still aren't willing to give it.

And look at what they're doing now is the best -- the best answer I have. Settlement sizes have doubled. We're building roads and tearing up Palestinian houses and orchards. Palestinians are living in despair. And that before the intifada even began.

According to Zogby, responsibility is something only Jews have. Palestinian Arabs are not responsible for their actions, of course. Israel has no right to respond to terror attacks but PalArabs have every right to respond to "despair."

Even at the end of the first interview above, Zogby shows his double standard by putting Hezbollah terror in "context" but refusing to give israel the same courtesy:

ZUCKERMAN: OK. Let me just say this, we are in a situation here which is called war. War which is instigated by a terrorist organization called the Hezbollah, which attacked innocent people. They had pulled -- the Israelis had withdrawn from a U.N. sanctioned border. It was started by Hezbollah, which has it's (UNINTELLIGIBLE) to attack Israel and to destroy Israel.

Israel is doing this as a matter of self-defense against people who hide among women and children deliberately.

ZOGBY: After 22 years of occupation of the south, a lot of bitterness, a lot of wounds. They're not going to go away overnight. And Israel has not been an innocent bystander all this time, even in the last six years, Mort.

This man, who is a moderate compared to most Arabs, still has an almost psychotic double standard that reflects his own bigotry and bias, and for all the smooth words he speaks on CNN, he is nothing but a hypocrite.

Hezbollah keeps hitting UN positions. No international outcry.

From the UN yesterday:

Four mortar rounds from the Hezbollah side impacted directly inside a UNIFIL position in the area of Deir Mimess yesterday evening, causing extensive material damage, and destroying a fuel storage tank, but with no casualties. ... There was one incident of firing from the Hezbollah side close to a UNIFIL position in the area of Hula. Hezbollah also fired rockets from the vicinity of UN positions in Labouneh, Tibnin and At Tiri.

Today:

One Katyusha rocket from the Hezbollah side impacted directly inside the UNIFIL headquarters in Naqoura yesterday evening, causing extensive material damage, and lightly wounding one French soldier. One artillery round from an unknown source impacted 10 meters from a UNIFIL position in the area of Hula last night. Hezbollah fired small arms at a UNIFIL APC moving on the coastal road some 5km north of Naqoura this morning, causing some damage on the vehicle, but no injuries. Hezbollah also fired from the vicinity of UN positions in Labouneh, Tibnin, Brashit and Haris.

AP TV: Inherent bias in all TV news against Israel (LGF)

Little Green Footballs published an amazing article describing the business model of Associated Press TV News, which provides raw video images to all major broadcasters in much the same way AP and Reuters provides raw photographs to newspapers.

It has many of the inherent problems that the wire services have that can skew the news for the pro-Arab agenda: hiring local stringers to take the video and providing their own descriptions of the events which may or may not be biased or even accurate. The subscribing news services like BBC, CNN and Fox decide what to air and how to describe it, but the basic information is provided by APTN.

The most troubling part, though, is that Arab states hire the same APTN to provide entire newscasts for them, not just clips. The same people who have to create news programs for Arab TV (with the biases that they require) are coworkers with the ones who provide the supposedly unbiased clips. This has two effects: the initial footage is slanted towards what Arab audiences want to see, and access to historic video has to be approved by APTN. As the author of the article mentions, this may be why the TV news never shows Palestinian celebrations of 9/11 or the Arab lynch mob in Ramallah in clips - AP may be refusing to allow such "sensitive" video to be rebroadcast.

Read the whole article. If the media's entire business model is skewed against impartiality, these things need to be exposed.

Thank you so much to those who made the original Elder Challenge a success. As you can see on the sidebar, between our sponsors and donors we have raised almost $5200 for Israeli charities so far.

Version 3 is a twist on the earlier matching programs. Donors can give to the charities of their choice as they usually do, and send (sanitized) receipts to me at elderchallenge -at- gmail.com.

I will list specific donations on the sidebar (anonymously, of course.) Anyone who wants to match an existing donation can then do so, and let me know.

So, for example, at one point in time we may see that someone donated $18 to Mogen Dovid Adom, someone else gave $36 to the One Israel Fund and a third gave $50 to Zaka. If you want to match any of these donations, just donate it yourself, send me the receipt telling me it was a matching donation, and I'll keep the totals updated and inform the original donor that their donation has been matched.

It is a little shticky but the point is, of course, to make sure that we keep the money going to those who need it.

If you want to donate to a different Israeli charity, feel free to do so - just make sure that it can be paid online, give us a web address and if people want to match, they can.

I will keep the two running totals on the sidebar of the amount donated and the amount matched.

I hope this isn't too confusing!

The new challenge starts immediately. We'll try for $1000 donated and another $1000 matched in the next 10 days, by August 21.

Thanks again to all who donated and especially for the generous people who sponsored Version 2 of the challenge!

!תזכו למצוות

Michigan Muslims threaten Jews, support terror

I wrote in May about how the Muslim community in Dearborn, Michigan was openly pro-Hezbollah. I also wondered last month whether there was active fundraising for terror in the same community.

NPR buries interesting details in the middle of a story about Lebanese-Americans:

New Support for Hezbollah
Osama Siblani runs the Arab-American News, America's largest such newspaper. He says the fighting is fueling anger in his community -- not at Hezbollah, but at the Bush administration.

"The anger that you see in the Arab community, you do not see in the eyes of the American community," says Siblani. "They're not viewing the same thing. And the perspective you get out of Jazeera or Arabiya, you do not get it out of Fox News or CNN."

Siblani says many in the community who opposed Hezbollah before the fighting have now changed their minds. The U.S. State Department has designated Hezbollah a terrorist organization. Siblani disagrees.

"The terrorist here is the Bush administration," he says.

Daily Demonstrations

Daily protests occur in Dearborn. At one recent demonstration, organized by the Congress of Arab-Americans, about 1,000 people attended. College-age men asked, in call and response fashion, "Who is your army?" Protestors responded: "Hezbollah." "Who is your leader?" they were asked. "Nasrallah," the chanters responded. Many carried placards of the Hezbollah leader. A few days earlier at an even larger demonstration, more than 15,000 turned out, about half of Dearborn's Arab community.

Those who regularly attend the demonstrations tend to be the most strident.

"Oh, Jews, remember Khaibar," the marchers chant. "The army of the Prophet will return."

The line is a reference to Khaibar, a Jewish town north of Medina that, according to Islamic tradition, was overtaken by the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century. Once defeated, the surviving Jews of Khaibar were forced into serfdom. Two decades later, they were expelled from the Arabian peninsula.

So half of the Dearborn Muslim community attends demonstrations with explicit death threats against Jews. NPR calls them "strident."

As usual, Debbie Schlussel is all over this story, and her regular reports covering the Muslim communities in Michigan are chilling.

One must also ask: if the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful, how come the biggest terror supporters almost invariably come from the largest Muslim communities, and terrorists invariably hide in those same communities? One would think that the peaceful majority would have a moderating effect.

Does Hezbollah already own Lebanon?

I can't claim to be an expert on Lebanon's history or psyche. But what can one make of the following recent news items:

The Lebanese Prime Minister's comments are indistinguishable from Hezbollah's.
A poll claims that 87% of Lebanese now support Hezbollah.
The Lebanese Army allowed Hezbollah to import arms openly from Syria.

And then...

Hezbollah is interested in the plan where the Lebanese army replaces them south of the Litani river.

The only way this all makes sense is if Hezbollah is already confident that they own Lebanon, and therefore a Lebanese force at the border with Israel is synonymous with Hezbollah itself.

Lebanon is 60% Muslim and 40% Christian, so the Lebanon poll numbers may be considered suspect. But Hezbollah seems to have already established a network of fear, a modern Arab KGB, where politicians and the media are afraid to say anything that might upset them.

Lebanon may already be lost.

UPDATE: Meryl Yourish makes a similar point about Hezbollah and the Lebanese army, and adds evidence that the Lebanese army helped Hezbollah target the Israeli naval vessel in mid-July.

AP practically writing press releases for Hezbollah

Confederate Yankee writes a good essay about Hezbollah's media manipulation. Here's part:

Scan the photos coming out of Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon, and you'll see and unending stream of dramatic photos of dead women and children and anguished rescue workers climbing through the remains of bombed-out residential buildings, and you will see heart-rending photos of toys in the rubble. You will see mourning. You will see pain. You will see a civilian infrastructure in tatters.

What you will not see, except in very rare cases, is Hezbollah.

The "Party of God," well-known for their parades of armed masked men in the past, have vanished into the ether. You will see no Hezbollah fighters brandishing their weapons with bravado. You will see no photos of Hezbollah’s rocket launchers or rockets prepared to fire upon Israel’s civilian population. You will see no photographs of shattered launchers or weapons caches or even fighting aged men amid the rubble. The media itself quietly reports that anyone who does take such pictures may be killed, though you wouldn’t know it from the amount of attention that disturbing detail has received in the press.

Hezbollah is fighting the Victim's War, hiding behind civilians that they set up as targeted pawns by firing rockets from inside Lebanon's villages, cites, and towns, from outside apartment buildings, hospitals and schools in residential neighborhoods.

It is a war of cowards, largely covered by sympathetic Arab Muslim stringers and their Hezbollah minders who determine what can and what cannot be reported; a war in which the "professional" media is all too complicit.

Well, here are one of those rare cases, along with a caption that is so fawning that one almost has to assume that the author is on the Hezbollah payroll:

A Hezbollah volunteer carries pots and pans, as he passes next to bags full of food trays with rice before delivering them tosome of the hundreds of thousands of refugees now living in schools across the capital at a makeshift Hezbollah-run kitchen in Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday Aug. 10, 2006. Even now, despite crippling Israeli airstrikes that have destroyed most of Hezbollah offices across the country, the guerrilla group is actively assisting in relief efforts. Hezbollah runs a sophisticated network of schools, clinics and social services deeply rooted in the Shiite Muslim community.(AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Hezbollah volunteers fill food trays with rice before delivering them to some of the hundreds of thousands of refugees now living in schools across the capital, at a makeshift Hezbollah-run kitchen in Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday Aug. 10, 2006. Even now, despite crippling Israeli airstrikes that have destroyed most of Hezbollah offices across the country, the guerrilla group is actively assisting in relief efforts. Hezbollah runs a sophisticated network of schools, clinics and social services deeply rooted in the Shiite Muslim community.(AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

This has been a Green Helmet production

A German TV magazine shows video of "Green Helmet Man" directing photographers and videographers in Qana, as well as staging multiple scenes with the same dead boy's body to get a better shot.

News you may have missed

Extremely rhetorical question

By now you've heard about the attempted mass murder terror attack that was stopped by Scotland Yard this morning.

Not quite as well known are the other Al-Qaeda terror attacks that have been stopped in the UK and elsewhere in Europe and North America.

Here's the question:

If Hezbollah wins a perceived victory in Lebanon, will this increase or decrease the number of Islamist terror attacks worldwide?

And the followup question:

How come the free world is refusing to act as if they know the answer to this question?

Abbas praises Hezbollah. Anyone shocked?

That famous Palestinian "moderate" is praising the group that aims thousands of rockets at innocent civilians - and which has so far killed many Arabs as well.

In an interview on al Arabiya TV on Sunday, the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas voiced strong support for "the resistance" in Lebanon. Abbas said that he and his people "definitely perceive the resistance in Lebanon as noble Arab resistance."

We have yet to see Abu Mazen ever condemn a terror attack against Jews on moral grounds.