Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

April 2008 Qassam Calendar

As usual, this is far from complete, and it is more to show how ignored the Qassam issue is rather than to show how many are being fired. Many Qassams never make it in the news, and the rare times that the IDF publishes statistics shows that I am usually undercounting . Also, these are Qassams that don't make it to Israel; many that are fired explode in Gaza itself, often causing damage or even deaths.

This list does not include mortars being shot from Gaza, which are usually much more numerous on any given day. It also does not count the occasional rocket from Lebanon. It does count Grad/Katyusha rockets from Gaza.

I might have missed some during Passover.

April 2008

145 total

Previous calendars:

March 2008
February 2008
January
December 2007
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February

Saudi Vice, episode 15: The Evil Western Press

Our heroes at the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice have been getting a lot of bad press recently, and it is time to put a stop to it:

Western media is deliberately trying to malign the commission for unknown reasons, said the national head of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice in a wide ranging interview with Arab News.

“Or else, why should a respectable institution be denigrated because a few of its officials committed some judgmental errors?” said Ibrahim Al-Ghaith, the commission president.
...
The commission chief also wondered why some sections of the media, particularly in the West, are hostile to the commission, which only aims to persuade people to adhere to their religion and prevent them from morally lapsing.

“Some people are quick to criticize the commission by betraying their ignorance about this noble institution. They are oblivious to the commission’s achievements. They purposefully highlight a few individual mistakes to portray the commission as an evil entity,” Al-Ghaith said.

He added that he disapproves of the term “religious police,” which is commonly used by the Western press to describe the commission. “The official name of the organization is the General Presidency of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice,” Al-Ghaith said.

“The commission is keen to see that its officials are pious, knowledgeable, wise, moderate and gentle in all situations and, above all, never rude or violent,” he said.

“The commission has been offering special training to its field workers at all of its branch offices,” he said, adding that workers are asked to be gentle and told to improve their communication skills.

He also said that psychologists, sociologists, religious scholars, legal experts, educationists, professors and high-ranking officials deliver the training. “More than 80 percent of the commission’s field workers have attended various training programs."

We mentioned these training sessions in Episode 10, The Sting.

“Only five percent of cases we’ve dealt with were passed on to the police or the courts. The commission members are fully aware that publicity would only worsen the situation and leave ineffaceable social or psychological injuries to the youths involved. The members pass the suspects to legal authorities if only they are repeating the violation or do not listen to advice,” he added.

There are situations, which we cannot condone, he added. For example, if a man and woman are caught in a situation that is clearly spelled out in the Holy Qur’an or Sunnah to be wrong, then the commission has no choice but to hand those involved to the police, he said.

Do you see what a raw deal the Commission gets in the media?

Looking back at previous episodes, one can see that every single one was just a simple misunderstanding.

The Arabs who didn't leave

As Nakba celebrations get underway, nobody is talking about the 160,000 Arabs who didn't flee Palestine in 1948.

This group of people put a lie to the "ethnic cleansing" calumny that will be tossed about like confetti over the next month. While it is undeniably true that they were not treated equally in the wake of a bruising war, they were hardly treated as subhuman. In fact, Arabs who left were jealous of their brethren who stayed to become citizens of Israel.

Contemporaneous accounts by Jews about those Arabs show that no one intended for them to move, either.

From the Palestine Post, August 5, 1948:

If Jews had wanted to get rid of all the Arabs of Palestine, some of that hate would filter through to articles like these. We see that the facts are quite the contrary - while Jews were not interested in the return of Arabs who fought to kill them all, they had no problem with those who only wanted to live in peace with them.

This is why UN Resolution 194, which the PalArabs even today erroneously claim gives them a "right to return," specifically states "the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date." That clause is what Israeli Jews have wanted for sixty years, and the Arab side has been the one that has been full of hate and incitement for those same six decades.

The definition of "nakba" depends on the audience

Most Westerners would say that when Palestinian Arabs refer to the "nakba", or catastrophe, that they are referring to the dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs from their homes in 1948, and their defeat in the 1948 war. Certainly pro-Palestinian Arab Westerners use the term that way, and Palestinian Arabs speaking to Westerners seem to keep that definition as well.

Wikipedia:Nakba Day, meaning "Day of the catastrophe" is a annual day of commemoration for the Palestinian people of their displacement and dispossession as a result of their defeat in the 1948 Palestine war.

Electronic Intifada: Every year Palestinians commemorate the Nakba ("the catastrophe"): the expulsion and dispossession of hundreds of thousands Palestinians from their homes and land in 1948.

Nakba Archive: During the 1948 war with the nascent state of Israel it is estimated that around half of the 1.4 million Palestinian Arabs were driven from their homes or fled, to neighboring Arab states. This period of Palestinian history has come to be known as al-Nakba, ‘the catastrophe’.

To the West, this makes sense - it can certainly be seen as catastrophic that a large group of people become homeless in the space of a year, no matter the circumstances.

There is another definition of Nakba, however, one that Westerners do not see nearly as much.

Palestine News Network: The Israelis are gearing up to celebrate 60 years since the inception of their state, what the Palestinians refer to as the Catastrophe, Al Nakba.

Gulf News: Not quite two weeks from now, on May 8, Palestinians will commemorate the Nakba, when their homeland was dismembered exactly 60 years ago that day.

In other words, to Arabs, the Nakba is more associated with the establishment of Israel than with any negative events that occurred to Arabs in Palestine.

A little reflection shows that the idea that the Nakba is meant to show solidarity with Palestinian Arabs and not just antipathy to Zionist Jews is ludicrous. After all, the Palestinian Arabs have been kept in stateless limbo due to the direct actions of their Arab brethren and their own failed leaders, who cynically use them as pawns - to pressure Israel.

It is most instructive that "Nakba Day" is timed to coincide with the anniversary of Israel's independence, not with the anniversary of any notable acts of dispossession or massacres like Deir Yassin. The true catastrophe, in Arab thought, is the creation of a Jewish state and not the tragedies that happened to the Arab citizens who fled or died.

Palestinian Arabs cannot even conceive that there is a difference between the two concepts; that Israel's establishment was not meant to displace hundreds of thousands of people. They cannot imagine that the Jews at the time were far more interested in surviving and in building a viable state where they could live in peace than in hurting others - to Arabs of Palestinian descent, force-fed a steady diet of lies and propaganda, the Jews' entire purpose was destructive and not positive. (This is, of course, another aspect of their own projection of their desires vis a vis the Jews of Palestine in 1948.)

But even deeper is the idea that Jews establishing a tiny state on their historic homeland itself is what they consider their disaster - even if not one Arab had left their home they would still regard Israel's Independence Day to be their catastrophe.

And they still do.

"Davidka" shell found at Kotel archaeological dig

From YNet:

More than 60 years after it was buried, archeologists working an excavation in the Western Wall Plaza unearthed a completely intact 'Davidka' mortar shell on Tuesday afternoon.

Sappers who were alerted to the scene removed the shell from the site and documented the finding before transported it outside city limits to detonate the explosives in a controlled environment.

Largely ineffective, the locally manufactured three-inch Davidka developed by the Haganah prior to the country's inception is remembered more for the noise it made rather than the damage it inflicted.

Wikipedia adds:

The name Davidka means “Little David”, and was said to be a tribute to the tiny, fledgling state of Israel fighting against the giant Arab Legion, in reference to King David's battle against the giant Goliath. It is generally accepted, however, that the weapon was named after its designer, David Leibowitch. Leibowitch designed and developed the weapon at the Mikveh Israel agricultural school in Holon in the winter of 1947-48.

The first Davidka was fired in combat on 13 March 1948, in the attack on the Abu Kabir neighborhood of Yafo. Probably the greatest victory attributed to the Davidka was the liberation of the Citadel, a strongpoint in the center of Safed, on the night of May 9-10, 1948.[1]

Six Davidkas were manufactured in all, and two were given to each of the Palmach's three brigades (Harel, Yiftach, and HaNegev). The most famous of them were the one used by the Yiftach Brigade in the battle for Safed, which is now mounted in Davidka Square in that city, and the one mounted in Jerusalem's Davidka Square, which has a shell still attached, memorializing the Harel Brigade's participation in the battle for Jerusalem.

As with any mortar, the secret of the Davidka's operation was in its 40kg (roughly 90lb) shell. In this case, as seen in the image on the right, the gigantic shell was much larger than the mortar from which it was fired. Rather than with more conventional mortars, where the shell is inserted into the tube and the entire projectile travels through the tube to gain initial guidance at launch time, the Davidka's tail tube is the only part of the shell which fit inside the launch tube. This contributed to the weapon's notorious inaccuracy, as the shell lacked adequate guidance during the launch phase to acquire aerodynamic stability in the intended direction...

Small pieces of metal and tubes were welded onto the outside of casing, reducing the weapon's accuracy even further than its already non-aerodynamic design, but contributing greatly to the whistles and shrieks which it made when in flight. The noise was its most important effect, so that anyone near a Davidka mortar would hear the shell seeming to fall very near to them before bursting very loudly, increasing the fear factor. It is said that the Arabs against which the Davidka was deployed, having been told that many of the designers of America's atomic bomb were Jewish (e.g., Einstein and Oppenheimer,) thought that they were being attacked with atomic weapons.

The Palestine Post, in its May 23, 1949 issue, had this article about the Davidka:

A small party of former Haganah commanders met at a cafe in Tel Aviv to honour the inventor of the first heavy artillery of the Haganah. It was already a time for reminiscences and although the war was still on, and tanks and artillery rumbled through the land, the first home-made artillery was already a museum piece, like the long rifle of the American backswoodsmen in their Revolutionary War.

As the commanders raised their glasses in a toast to David Kablani, the inventor of the "Davidka," the thoughts of the inventor turned to a time so long. . . . a few months. . . . back when Tel Aviv was ringed with siege and the state of Israel was little more than a dream. Kablani, a member of Haganah for 22 years, had built a 3-inch mortar back in 1923 after a Polish model. At that time all of Haganah's heavy weapons were taken from Kablani's secret workshop, either on foot or hidden in trucks, to S'dom at the southern end of the Dead Sea, the only testing gtound they were safely out of sight of the British and the Arabs.

When the Arab attacks began, Kablani was appointed armourer for the southern area of Tel Aviv, including Manshieh, Salameh and Abu Kebir. For this entire sector of the front, he had only 200 weapons of all kinds, including 45 rifles, 150 Sten guns, and a number of automatic rifles and 2-inch mortars, and the commanders would battle for every Sten gun, which would pass from hand to hand for each engagement.

The idea for the "Davidka" was born out of the suffering and death of so many Haganah sappers who went into Arab posts under fire with loads of explosives night after night. If only a weapon could be invented which could hurl a charge of explosives into the Arab positions from a safe distance, Kablani thought. He calculated and planned , and finally presented his idea to his commanders.

The first test, with a sand-filled shell, proved a success. The night of March 13 was fixed for the first operation, against Abu Kebir. Two more models and nine live shells were prepared .

The residents of Tel Aviv were used to their nightly storm of gunfire, and went to sleep as usual in the rifle exchanges of that Saturday night. The three new mortars were taken by truck to the advanced positions, and a general attack on Abu Kebir was prepared.

At midnight a tremendous explosion woke up all Tel Aviv and Jaffa . A dead silence fell on the entire front, and the population g u e s s e d that the war had entered a new stage.

Two more booming explosions followed. When the Haganah men broke into Abu Kebir, they found the village completely deserted. The Arabs had fled the unknown weapon of the Jews, and shortly thereafter the desertion of Jaffa began.

Immediately after 12 more mortars were built and sent to Haifa, Jerusalem, and Sated. Soon the "Davidka" became as integral a part of Haganah as the slouch hat of the Australian army.

Palmach commanders, before an operation, would calculate the number of "Davidka" shells needed, figuring one shell for a small village, and as much as three for a large one. Rumours spread through the Arab population that "King David " had returned to fight with his people.

The climax in the career of the "Davidka" came in the battle for the liberation of Safed. Fighting asainst an enemy vastly superior in both numbers and arms, and one fortified in the highest point of the city, Safed had been one of the most difficult points in the country. A desperate effort was needed to liberate this strategic city before the expected Arab invasion after May 15.

The attack was begun with the firing of several "Davidka" shells, and the explosions reverberated deafeningly through the echoing hills. Immediately rumour spread among the Arabs, aided by a sudden, unseasonal rain that the Jews were using the Atom bomb. The attack found the enemy already demoralized and fleeing from the city by the thousands.

A Reuters report from Amman shortly thereafter said mysteriously, "the Jews are using a new secret weapon."

A few days later the State of Israel was proclaimed and expertly tooled weapons began to come in from abroad. The hand-made grenade and the home-made "Davidka" were quickly put aside, but the men who had used them had already turned the tide of the war.

The missing picture

I have spent a lot of time looking at the circumstances around yesterday's blast that killed much of the Me'tiq family and there is one thing missing from all of the press coverage:

Pictures of the damaged house.

Palestinian Arabs still claim that it was an Israeli tank shell that went through the roof of the house and exploded (presumably in the kitchen). Israel claims that the explosion occurred outside the house from a terrorist's munitions.

With Gaza crawling with Palestinian Arab stringers and photographers, who spare no time finding time to photograph funerals and bodies, why have we not seen any pictures of the house where a "massacre" supposedly took place? In other Israeli strikes there have been photos shown of the damage.

It would be trivial for AP or Reuters or AFP to send a photographer to Beit Hanoun to take such a picture. So why hasn't it happened?

The reason is almost certainly because the pictures would show a giant crater outside the house, and the damage radiating from that crater. The pictures would vindicate the IDF's version of events. The Palestinian Arab victimhood narrative would be once again destroyed, and the manipulated righteous indignation of the Arab world would evaporate.

Since the Gaza wire service photographers are only interested in furthering the Palestinian Arab cause, they have no incentive to document anything that makes Israel look less evil. (They also live in fear of what Hamas would do to them should they publish things not to their liking.) So they simply refuse to take pictures that does not follow the Hamas line.

Interestingly, while I have great doubts that this is legitimate, a person claiming to be an AP reporter wrote a comment to Ha'aretz:

Title: I reported all this to all news agencies, saw it with my own eyes

Name: Ali-AP Reporter

City: El-Aresh State: Egypt

Good Morning to everybody,

Several of us were called by Hamas to witness an attack on the Zionist forces by men carrying a large load of explosives. However when we got close to the Abu Meatik family home the Zionist birds came from the skies and tore to pieces the Martyrs who were charged with this task. In the ensuing explosions of their loads the Abu Meatik children playing in the street in front of them died as well.

Our Jeep full of reporters like me was lucky to be 50 meters behind so it escaped the blast.

The other reporters were afraid to contact their news agencies for fear of retaliation after reporting such unpleasant truths but I was going to be back in Cairo today anyway so I reported everything.

As a matter of fact yesterday I packed my bags as soon as possible to go to Rafah to cross the border last night, just to be safe and I slept in a hotel in El-Aresh.

Probably bogus, but no less bogus than much of the reporting coming out of Gaza nowadays.

Journalism hall of shame

Here is a list of selected news articles, published well after Israel denied that its fire directly killed the Gaza family, that take the Palestinian Arab lying version to be the truth or severely downplay Israel's version:

Mirror (UK):

A mum and four children died at the breakfast table as a shell flattened their tiny home in the Gaza Strip.
It was fired from an Israeli tank in a raid aimed at militants after gun battles nearby.

Glasgow DailyRecord headline: Tank Kills Gaza Kids

Los Angeles Times - doesn't mention Israeli version until paragraph 8.

Independent(UK) headline: Israeli attack kills Palestinian mother and four children (but the second paragraph mentions Israeli denials)

I'm not even bothering to mention Arab and Iranian "news" sources which almost universally don't publish Israel's version of events at all.

Hamas stole 45,000 liters of fuel at gunpoint today

Palestine Press reports:

head of the Palestinian Petrol Agency in Gaza Mujahid Salama said that elements of the Hamas movement looted today forty five thousand litres of fuel that were in the oil depots in the Nahal Oz crossing east of Gaza City.

He added in an interview with the Voice of Palestine radio this morning that "these elements forced the officials of the Petroleum Authority to provide this amount of fuel at gunpoint."

Salama added that this fuel was allocated to fuel stations in the Gaza.

He noted that fuel prices hit record numbers in the sector, which stopped most of the means of transportation except when cars and vans of the ministers and leaders of Hamas and the militias.

Five more tunnels discovered by Egypt

Fox News reports:

An Egyptian security official says border guards have discovered five new underground smuggling tunnels north of the Rafah crossing point.

The official says two tunnels were used to pump fuel to the Gaza Strip which is facing severe energy shortages. One of the tunnels was found in a kitchen with a pump connected to hose running through it.

The tunnels were found early on Monday, added the official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to talk to the media.

And the other three tunnels? Take one guess. From Palestine Press (autotranslated:)

The Egyptian security sources said on Monday in press statements "that they found weapons and explosives in three of the tunnels detected on the Gaza border."

Weapons and explosives? Nah, not in Gaza!

AP still wrong on Beit Hanoun blast

It has been a few hours since Israel determined that the Gaza blast that killed most of a family was the result of a secondary explosion from targeted terrorists outside the house carrying munitions.

AP's Ibrahim Barzak is now reporting Israel's side of the story, but very skeptically:

In a statement, the military said explosives carried by the militants were detonated by an Israeli airstrike, and the blast from the explosives hit the house, not a tank shell, "and uninvolved civilians were hit." Palestinians said the militants were at least 400 yards from the house and none of the fighters were killed near the structure.

But the most detailed Gaza based account of the events, from PCHR which blames Israel for the explosion, show that this last sentence is a lie:

At approximately 8:15, an IOF plane fired a rocket at a group of resistance members near Abdallah Azzam Mosque, southwest of Izbit Abd Rabbou, approximately 1000 meters away from the main area of the incursion. The rocket fell 10 meters away from the house of Ahmad Eid Hassan Abu Me’tiq, seriously injuring a resistance member. Less than a minute later two rockets were fired at the same area and landed at the door of the same house, killing another resistance member: Ibrahim Salem Suliman Hajouj (20). Shrapnel from the rockets destroyed the house door and spread inside the house. Meyasar Metliq Abu Me’tiq (40) and her 6 children were eating breakfast only 2 meters away from the door. The shrapnel killed four of the children immediately. The mother was seriously injured; and the other two children were moderately injured. The mother later died of her wounds. In addition, 10 bystanders were injured, some of them sustaining moderate to serious injuries.

The AP cannot do basic fact-checks to show that their Palestinian Arab sources are, simply, liars, and by quoting them credulously they make it appear that the evidence supports the Palestinian Arab story and not the Israeli version. They are doing a better job than the thousand-odd "news" stories that don't even acknowledge Israel's claims, but they still fail basic journalism principles.

"World's Smallest Koran" not very impressive

From India's Economic Times:

DUBAI: The smallest copy of the Koran, the Islamic holy book, on display at The Bride Show here drew huge crowds at the recently concluded exhibition.

Almost one-third the size of its closest competitor, the 'miniature' Koran contains 10,000 lines engraved on sapphire measuring 58mm by 98mm which can be worn as pendant or a ring by brides and grooms on the wedding day, WAM news agency reported Monday.

The Koran has been engraved by Mir Emad Mokhtari with help of the latest advances in nanotechnology and has been officially registered as the smallest copy of the Holy Book at Astan-e Qods Razavi's Quran museum in Iran.

Is this an impressive display of Islamic nanotechnology?

This Koran fits in a space of roughly 2" x 4". This sounds more like microfiche than nanotechnology.

But last year, at Israel's Technion, they fit the entire Hebrew Bible - with diacritical marks! - in a space smaller than a pinhead:

The entire vowelled-Hebrew text of the Bible has been inscribed by Technion scientists on a gold-coated silicon surface smaller than the head of a pin.

The idea to inscribe the whole biblical text using a focussed-ion device was that of Prof. Uri Sivan, director of the Berrie Institute, and the project was carried out by Ohad Zohar, the center's physics education adviser, along with Dr. Alex Lahav, formerly lab director of the Wolfson Center for Microelectronics.

When the ions are shot at the surface, gold ions are removed from a 20-nanometer-wide spot to expose the darker silicon substrate underneath. A nanometer is equal to one billionth of meter or one millionth of a millimeter. The resulting letters can be observed only with a scanning electron microscope.

The nano-Bible will be photographed and expanded 10,000 times, and still be able to fit into a seven-by-seven-meter frame, to be hung in the Technion's physics faculty. The photograph will make it possible to read the entire Bible with the naked eye, and the height of each letter will be three millimeters.

Zohar said the original nano-Bible, the size of a crystal of sugar, would be displayed next to the photograph.

A sugar crystal (granulated, regular)is about 0.5 mm long. Which means that Technion managed to make their Hebrew Bible some 1/10000 the size of the Koran being touted here.

UPDATE: Mir Mokhtari, the inventor, clarifies things in my comments:

Hi, putting political disputes aside and sticking to the science and maths... the size is actually miss printed. It should read ten times smaller in both dimensions. The technology uses a 5nm spot size and has resolution better than 9nm around the edge of the words. We too could have made one much smaller, but you have to understand marketing and practicality. No point exhibiting something that requires a $1million SEM tool to be dragged around with. Also the value added to this art piece is the fact that it stands 1400degress heat during commissioning in jewellery and is scratch proof to extremely high impacts and can be worn on day to day basis. We managed to convince people all the words are there with a $5 handheld magnifier. Sometimes understanding people goes a longer way than understanding the technology....

Fair enough, the intent wasn't to set a technological record but to create a piece of jewelry.

Kids were killed by PalArab bomb

After reading the IDF explanation as well as the PCHR preliminary investigation into the deaths of the mother and four daughters this morning, I am convinced that the IDF version is correct - the IDF shot a missile at two terrorists who were outside the Abu Meatak home, and the explosives that at least one was carrying exploded, killing most of the family.

I would not count these as self-deaths, though, because it was a secondary explosion; it is not a "work accident" although their carrying explosives through a neighborhood and putting families at risk is clearly a war crime. (It's a judgment call but I need to be consistent in the count.)