Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Israeli Arabs wouldn't want to live anywhere else

Arabs might hate Israel but the ones who live there wouldn't trade their lives for anything else.

From a new survey on Arab/Jewish co-existence in Israel:

Do you think that any Arab nation can boast such numbers?

Other interesting findings include that most Israelis would like to see Arabic taught in Jewish schools, and an overwhelming majority of both Israeli Jews and Arabs agreed with the statement, "Israel should be a society in which Arab and Jewish citizens have mutual respect and equal opportunities."

Sounds just like apartheid-era South Africa, right?

Today's Gaza news you won't read anywhere else

Hamas attacked a medical clinic in Rafah. The Palestinian Ministry of Health announced that this is only the latest incident where Hamas has closed down Gaza medical centers and fired health workers, as well as confiscated medicines and equipment.

Jamal Watt, the Palestinian Minister of Religious Endowments, said that Hamas has embezzled many funds meant for charity. Watt said that this is not a crime against his ministry, but against Islamic law. He also complained about Hamas' politicization of mosques in Gaza.

Egyptian forces discovered another half-ton of explosives near the Rafah crossing. The cache included mortars and rockets, already separated into smaller bags for transport through smuggling tunnels under the border.

Hundreds of Arabs killed, no one cares

There are some Arabs in the Middle East who have been in a constant state of war against a professional army.

Their food supply has been cut, and they are desperately short on fuel. The government forces have cut all communications links. Hundreds have been killed in a short period of time.

And nobody really cares, because it isn't a Jewish government doing the fighting:

SA’ADA, May 25 — A fifth war between the Yemeni army and Houthis has broken out fiercely in numerous Sa’ada districts, Amran governorate’s Harf Sifyan district and Sana’a governorate’s Bani Hushaish district, leaving hundreds on both sides killed or injured, tribal sources said Sunday, adding that the war is the fiercest ever since fighting between the two sides first erupted in June 2004.

In Sa’ada’s Matra district, believed to be the main stronghold of Houthi loyalists, local sources reveal that government troops have been attacking the area for two weeks, using helicopters, tanks, Katyusha rockets and other heavy weaponry.

The same sources add that the government’s troops are facing fierce resistance by Houthis, thereby hindering them in achieving any notable progress on the ground.

Additionally, there are ongoing bloody confrontations between republican guards and Houthis in Dhahian city, located 8 kilometers east of Sa’ada city, but neither side scored victory.

As a result, government forces were obliged to dispatch more republican guard troops. Backed by helicopters, the newly dispatched troops are fighting fiercely with Houthis in several areas of Haidan district.

This latest war has left hundreds on both sides dead and other hundreds injured in a relatively short time period while the Yemeni government imposes an information blackout on battlegrounds after cutting off all wired and wireless communication means, local sources note.

They express concern about the governorate’s worsening human situation amid shortages in diesel and gasoline supplies and soaring propane gas prices due to the blocking of nearly all roads leading to Sa’ada governorate.

The clashes resulted in food shortages, the closure of markets and the suspension of traffic on the Sana’a-Sa’ada Highway.

I don't know enough about the Houthis to know which side is in the right, but I do know enough to say that most "human rights" groups spend much more time caring about one set of Arabs than any other.

Best metaphor for Iran contest

Recently, Iran's president Ahmadinejad referred to Israel as, among other things, a "stinking corpse." He has also called Israel a "dead rat."

Since we have scientifically proven that Iran's government is much closer to extinction than Israel is, we need to find a better metaphor for Iran than the rather prosaic "stinking corpse."

So, at the suggestion of the illustrious EBoZ, who better than my beloved readers to come up with the best pithy description of the Iranian regime, suitable for use by heads of state?

My initial try was "a maggoty, pus-filled festering wound on the armpit of the world" but that is a mouthful.

Any good ideas?

And, as my brother added,

After that we need a "A World without Persia" conference at Columbia University. Then a cartoon contest to parody the Iranian casualties in the Iran-Iraq war, followed by another conference denying that the conflict even happened.

But first things first. What do we call that sickening excuse for a nation?

Another "mysterious explosion" injures Gaza mom, daughters

PalPress reports:

Palestinian medical sources announced at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City Tuesday morning the injury of a mother and her two children in a mysterious explosion in the Shojaeya district east of Gaza City.

This is the same neighborhood in which a Qassam rocket fell on Saturday.

A real mystery, I tell ya.

Hamas porn filter slowing Gaza Internet service

The "pornography" Internet filter that Hamas had installed for all of Gaza - which probably is also used to spy on the Internet habits of everyone in Gaza - has slowed down all of Gaza's online access to a crawl.

The poor Gazans, most of whom supposedly eat only one meal a day, are having a hard time going online with their computers that run on the non-existent electricity in Gaza.

Hamas admitted that this slowdown was caused by its filtering software and says it is working hard to fix the problem.

Because they are all about customer service.

Terror attack in Jerusalem yesterday?

Palestinian Arab press is reporting that the "Galilee Freedom Brigades" that claimed responsibility for the Mercaz HaRav massacre is claiming to have killed an Israeli in the Gilo neighborhood of Jerusalem in his apartment.

I cannot find any stories about a murder in Jerusalem yesterday.

Hamas contines to arrest and harass journalists

From Reporters Without Borders:

A TV crew working for the German television station ARD was detained on 15 May in Jabaliya, in the north of the Gaza Strip, by Hamas security forces after covering a demonstration organised by members of Fatah, the party of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Cameraman Mohammed Al-Arabid and soundman Mwatasam Rashid were questioned for an hour and their equipment was confiscated.
Two journalists working for the Sudanese satellite television station Sudan TV were detained on 24 May in Gaza City while doing a report on what life is like for the city’s population. Reporter Samir Khalifa and cameraman Ahmed Al-Ras were questioned about their employer’s identity. They were suspected for working for the state-owned Palestine Broadcasting Corporation, which is controlled by the Palestinian Authority and has been banned in the Gaza Strip since June 2007. Khalifa used to work for the PBC but had to sever all contact with the station, which now operates out of the West Bank city of Ramallah.

It has been obvious for nearly a year that Hamas does not allow journalists to operate freely in Gaza and that it is now impossible to get objective news out of that area. Hamas harassment and threats of journalists is well documented. Western journalists have all but gone; all that is left are Arabs who fear, justifiably, for their lives.

The biggest example is Ma'an News, which was the single best source for reporting a year ago. Now its reports out of Gaza are carefully designed not to offend anyone in Hamas, to the point where they will continue to report on "work accidents" as being from Israeli missiles even after the terror groups themselves admit that it wasn't.

How can the casual reader know that they simply cannot trust any news that comes out of Gaza as being objective? It is all carefully scrubbed to make a group of murderers happy, yet even the major news agencies don't put caveats in their stories (as they do whenever the Israeli censor slightly limits their reporting.)

It is yet another example of how media bias is sometimes not only from within.

I smell a fatwa coming

Last month, a book was published named "Why We Left Islam: Former Muslims Speak Out". Some predicted that Muslims would get very upset over the cover, which depicts a picture of Mohammed being ripped in half:

Even so, it seems to have sailed under the Muslim radar - until now.

I just saw a story about this book, and especially the cover, in the Palestinian Arab Firas Press.

So it is possible that this issue will percolate up in the Muslim world in the coming weeks.

Gaza crossing roundup

Since my last round-up on May 19, here are some of the things that have happened at Gaza crossings:

May 22 - massive truck bomb at the Erez crossing, killing the suicide bomber but no one else.
May 23: One mortar shot at Sufa.
May 24-25: Several mortars shot at Nahal Oz, three shot at Sufa.

But Hamas and Jimmy Carter want the crossings opened.

Jimmy betraying national secrets?

Once upon a time, strange as it may sound now, Jimmy Carter was the President of the United States. As president, he was privy to a great deal of secret information that he was honor-bound to keep private.

Now, everyone assumes that Israel has nuclear weapons. No one really knows how many, though. Chances are that the United States government does have a much clearer idea of how many such weapons Israel has, and, as Israel is an ally of the US, it keeps mum.

What does one do with a president who, after he leaves office, decides to betray the trust that Americans and their allies placed in him?

Israel has 150 nuclear weapons in its arsenal, former President Jimmy Carter said yesterday, while arguing that the US should talk directly to Iran to persuade it to drop its nuclear ambitions.

This is not some investigative reporter coming up with these numbers, this is an ex-president. As such, they appear to have more inside information behind them.

If a former Israeli prime minister would tell a public venue about US spies found in Israel, or perhaps about US military capabilities and weaknesses discovered during joint exercises, what would be the US reaction? If Tony Blair announced the exact location of US submarines when he was prime minister, what kind of an uproar would that cause? Because this is exactly what Jimmy Carter just did to Israel.

He just gave priceless information to Iran about Israel's nuclear arsenal.

Does this make him a spy? A turncoat? I don't know, but at the very least it should mean that whatever little credibility he still has as a decent human being is now utterly lost.

Hamas mirroring Hezbollah's fiber optic network

Palestine Press Agency reports that Hamas is building its own communications network similar to the private one that Hezbollah built in Lebanon. The network uses a fiber-optic backbone.

A fiber optic network has two major advantages to the terrorists: it cannot be jammed electromagnetically, and it is very difficult to tap. Any attempts to tap fiber optics require a physical presence on the ground, and they are easily noticed and isolated by the network infrastructure.

The Hezbollah and Hamas networks use Chinese components with features (and presumably architecture) built by Iran.