Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, July 20, 2009

Another airhead going Jewish?

Only a couple of months ago, Lindsay Lohan said she wanted to convert to Judaism. Now, Britney Spears is said to be going the same, um, derech.

Apparently, Kabbalah is no longer the "in" thing, not to mention that people in Hollywood think that becoming a Jew is a great career move.

Why do these airhead shiksas always wait until they are the punchlines to Conan jokes before they decide to join the Chosen People? And why do we have to be the ones chosen?

Don't they realize that the easiest way to turn off their Jewish significant others is to change from an irresistible shiksa into a JAP?

What-ever.

Anyway, Andy Borowitz in the New Yorker channels Britney's diary as she goes through the arduous process of becoming a yiddishe mamma(ry.)

Shalom, Diary:
I think Rabbi Pearlstein is really pissed at me. Today in Jewish class he was going through the Halakha, which I thought was the Jewish word for Hannah Montana but turns out to be like a whole bunch of boring laws about days of the week and pork and shit, and I was like, “Rabbi P., is there any way you could break this down into a bunch of tweets? I’ll read it on my phone on the way to rehearsal.” He got so mad those curls on the sides of his head started shaking. (I don’t know why he won’t let my stylist snip them off. They’re not a good look for him, K.?)

The story has a happy ending, though.

Ma'an proves its boar case by quoting itself

Ma'an has yet another of its articles about wild boars in the West Bank, but this one is a little bit more even-handed:

Salfit residents have continuously complained about the boars, which they say are not indigenous to the area, attacking residents and crops in the northern West Bank districts. Last February 53-year-old Hikmat Abdul Mu'ti from the town of Beit Rima was hospitalized after suffering "deep wounds," according to medics at Yasser Arafat Hospital in Salfit city.

Boars have been causing problems inside Israel, as well. Israel's Nature and Parks Authority instituted a massive cull in the northern Haifa region in May, following complaints similar to the Palestinians' in Salfit.

But you know that they can't report on the pigs without blaming the Jews somehow:

Environmentalists cite Israel's West Bank wall as a potential cause for the buildup of wild pigs in Salfit, as in recent years their annual migration toward the Galilee has been disrupted.

But...I thought they weren't indigenous to the area. Could it be that the residents of Salfit are being less than honest?

No matter. We have other bacon to fry:

Some Salfit residents claim that the wild boars have escaped or were released intentionally from nearby Israeli settlements such as Ariel, although pigs are generally considered unclean in Judaism, as well as Islam. The only known Jewish-run pig farm in the region, the Institute for Animal Research, operates inside Israel at the Negev kibbutz of Lahav.

Still others insist that they have witnessed the pigs being unloaded from trucks by settlers. Mohammad Hassan last month told a Land Research Center field researcher he saw settlers release some in the Al-Ashara region of the Salfit-area village of Iskaka.

Now comes the funny part:

The Applied Research Institute Jerusalem (ARIJ) also reports that settlers from Ariel "frequently" release wild boars into the area, causing economic damage and even physical attacks on people. The organization stated that there were four reported cases where children were injured by the animals.

Who is the ARIJ? Well, they have a very nice web page and they have a number of projects in the territories. So I looked at the last couple of their newsletters to see what they have to say about the boars. Here's one of them:

Boars set free by Israeli settlers damaged sheep barns and beehives in the northern West Bank village of Salem, east of Nablus. Boars attacked three homes and sheep barns, owned by Theib and Ziad Hasan, as well as 32 beehives owned by Taha Hamdan. The boars also attacked a car owned by
Baha’ Hussein on his way out of the village. Maannews (May 3, 2009).

In fact, at least for the past few months, every single story in ARIJ that said that settlers released boars was a direct quote from Ma'an itself!

Ma'an finally realized that its incessant insistence that the boars were raised by evil Jewish settlers made no sense, and it tried to craft this story to include the criticisms. But it is still invested in the idea of Jewish-owned pigs that it quotes a seemingly impartial scientific sounding organization that insists that Jewish settlers frequently release the pigs - an organization that gets all its boar information from the previous months of Ma'an lies!

The perfect feedback loop!

Another Hamas terrorist killed "on a Jihad mission"

The Al Qassam Brigades website mentions another Hamas member who accidentally got offed while training to kill Jews, this time in Gaza City.

The 2009 PalArab self-death count is now at 119.

Jordanian criminals disguising themselves as Muslim women

Al-Arabiya (Arabic) reports on a relatively new phenomenon - Jordanian criminals are disguising themselves with hijabs and niqabs to do various crimes.

The crimes include "robbery, theft, sorcery and sexual abuse."

The crimes have reportedly been inspired by robberies in Great Britain done by men disguising themselves in niqabs.

For the past few years there have been increasing reports of men with veils snatching purses, abducting women and holding up banks and stores.

They also go into apartment houses, ask around to verify that no men are around and then force themselves in and steal items.

Training for the Saudi Vice Squad

From the Saudi Gazette:

The British Council in Riyadh has begun teaching English to members of the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (Hai’a) as part of ongoing training to improve the organization’s skills in communication and dialogue.

Hai’a spokesman Abdul Mohsen Al-Qaffari said that the six-level course would help improve staff competence in their work.

The Hai’a office in the Eastern Province also plans to hold a five-day course on issues related to black magic and those who practice it for 25 of its members.

Because when you are in the Muttawa, you have to be prepared for anything: English-speakers and practitioners of black magic.

12 year old Saudi girl divorces her husband, 37

From the Saudi Gazette:

A Shariah Court in the Eastern Province has permitted the divorce of a 12-year-old girl from her 37-year-old husband after her siblings filed a complaint stating that their father married her off without their consent.

A judicial source said the 12-year-old’s siblings objected to the union on the grounds of her age as well as “other reasons related to marriage”, and that when the husband was summoned he agreed to the divorce at the request of the girl’s family.

I wonder how long she was married to her pedophile husband before this.

Open thread plus

It looks like I will not be able to post much today, and there is lots of leftover flotsam in the comments from yesterday's freak show, so feel free to discuss amongst yourselves the major issues of Life, the Universe and Everything.

And also check out Barry Rubin, who has been on an incredible tear lately.

Today's PalArab news 7-20-09

The Fatah infighting continues. A special session of the PLO Executive Committee met on Saturday to condemn Farouk Kaddoumi for his accusations that Mahmoud Abbas plotted to assassinate Arafat, but the session was clearly put together only by Kaddoumi's enemies. Meanwhile, four armed factions of Fatah, including the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and a group of Israeli Arabs, declared their support for Kaddoumi. Dov Weisglass, who attended all the Sharon/Abbas meetings, says the entire episode was made up by Kaddoumi, and Suha Arafat is also upset because blaming Abbas takes away the responsibility from Arafat's real killers - Israel.

Palestine Press Agency quotes a US magazine as giving out specific details on how Israel would strike Iran, along with operational windows for the strike and where the IDF is practicing. Hard to say whether the articles, in Global Politician, are legit or not.

Egypt seized a half ton of explosives and ten mortars on their way to Gaza.

Two Gazans, including a 17-year old, were killed in a smuggling tunnel collapse.

The PA shot and wounded two Hamas members in the West Bank. Their neighbors in the Al-Jalazoun camp tried to protect the Hamas members from arrest.

A group of Israeli Arabs demanded that the Israel compensate them for damage done by wild boars. They didn't seem to blame "settlers," apparently boars inside the Green Line have different masters than those on the outside.

The 2009 PalArab self-death count is now at 118.

What is the goal of foreign policy?

Today was an extraordinary day for the blog, as my posting about how Iranian prison guards rape women before their execution was featured on Yahoo news story pages for much of the day, and the headline apparently attracted some 20,000 people to view the article.

As one could expect from such an influx of people, I received a lot of comments, and the quality of most of them were about what one would expect. There were many people who refused to believe the story, calling it a Zionist or Jewish conspiracy against Islam (even though the story was not about Islam, but Iran.) Some believed that this was a perfect opportunity to bring in lies about the Talmud. Others got into flamewars.

One commenter, "marie," dropped by another thread and said something that encapsulates much that is wrong with how Westerners tend to think nowadays. In response to my musings on Obama's naivete in trying to force Israel to abandon historic Jerusalem, she wrote:

Keep building settlements retards...that will get the palestinians to love you!

Notwithstanding the humor that results when someone who fancies herself an "intellectual" calls others "retards" as a rhetorical point, this comment struck me as emblematic of today's Western liberal thinking.

Is the point of foreign policy to make your enemy love you?

It appears that the foreign policies of many Western nations in recent decades has been built around just that desire.

The Western nations, wracked with guilt over colonialism and hegemony, believe that they deserve to be hated, and as a result they must bend over backwards to be loved by those they have wronged. It never works, of course, but that is just proof that they need to try harder.

In the case of Israel, the West thinks of Israel as a proxy for all their sins, the intellectual Jew imposing his will on the unwashed Arabs. The fact that Zionism is not a colonialist movement but rather a national restoration movement is lost on those who feel that guilt. To them, the Jews symbolize what they hate about themselves and their past evils, and the Arabs are symbolic of the put-upon aboriginal peoples forever sullied by European colonialism.

So to them, only one side is guilty - the "white" side.

Asking both sides to compromise is not how peace can come, according to this thinking. The Jews are guilty of the original Western sin and must pay for it. Forcing the Jews to pay for the sins of the British and French and Portuguese and Spanish is a way to displace the feelings of guilt over their own past injustices.

To this way of thinking, only the enemy can decide when enough concessions are made. The enemy - the pure, innocent victims - have complete veto power over every peace plan because this is not a negotiation: it is a capitulation, and admission of guilt, a plea for forgiveness. If you are not forgiven then you have not done a good enough job of penance, and the proof is - because you have not yet been forgiven.

The enemy - such a loaded term, we should say the "negotiating partner" - cannot be expected to compromise, ever. Only one side has the onus of guilt, and the non-Westerners are presumed innocent. Any crimes they commit must be looked at through the prism of the much more obscene Western sins.

Marie has stumbled upon the exact problem - the fact that many on the West hate themselves and the only penance is to gain forgiveness from those we think we have wronged. We must do whatever is needed to make them love us, and only then can we love ourselves.

Israel must also be forced to adhere to this formula. Every terror act is justified because it is a reaction to Israel's original sin of existing. Every defensive move Israel chooses to do is a painful reminder of its hostile, "colonialist" origins.

This is the subtext behind today's liberal attitudes to foreign policy. It is rooted in this deep sense of self-hate drenched in guilt. And this hate is projected into Israel, the lightning rod for all of the West's sins.

BBC doesn't recognize Israel as being part of Mideast

The BBC has a show called the "Middle East Business Report" that airs weekly. ifindterror tweeted me, saying that s/he never noticed anything about Israel on that program.

Sure enough, the word "Israel" does not appear in any of the synopses of shows over the past couple of months. Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Lebanon and Jordan all pop up, along with the impacts of Arab trade with China and the UK, but nothing about Israel's economy.

I guess Israel's economy is not very noteworthy compared to the other nations in the area. Or maybe Israel just isn't where we all thought it was.

The startling tone-deafness of the White House on settlements

When looking at this latest debacle of the White House demanding that Jews stop building and moving into East Jerusalem, it is remarkable how deeply naive and uninformed the Obama administration is.

The White House apparently cannot distinguish between the American Left, that dominates Obama's political thinking, and the Israeli Left. The administration apparently thought that they could split the Israelis along ideological lines by insisting on a settlement freeze, believing that the J Street crowd has the same mindset as Labor and Kadima. Instead, the White House has unified Israelis as never before, as even the most dovish, secular mainstream Israeli understands the need to keep large settlement blocs close to the Green Line and the importance of Jerusalem.

Despite all of the rumors about White House pressure on Arab governments, all of that is being done behind the scenes and outside the public eye. Only this one issue, that the White House clearly didn't understand in the least, has become a symbol of power, a political game of chicken between Israel and the US. The US promised its Arab allies that it would gain what it felt was a symbolic concession from Israel and, darn it, it has to keep its word, even if it had no idea that these issues weren't merely symbolic to Israelis. Once the White House made the demand public, it cannot back down.

And Netanyahu is not going to yield.

So something that could have been handled easily has turned into a major fissure, because President Obama naively thought that the Israeli left would abandon Netanyahu over the settlements issue. And he couldn't be bothered to actually talk to Netanyahu, someone he disparaged during the campaign.

Obama's naivete on this topic was revealed some 18 months ago. One would have thought he would have learned something in the meanwhile.

Jordan's Interior Minister defends discrimination against PalArabs

A few weeks ago I mentioned an issue that has been percolating in Jordan that has received no attention in the Western media - the increasing discrimination that Jordanians of Palestinian origin have been receiving from Jordan, as the citizenship rights of many have been stripped away and their remaining rights whittled down.

The issue has been picked up by London-based Dar al-Hayat (in Arabic only, of course.) They published an interview with Jordan's Interior Minister Nayef. The minister tries at first to deflect the question, blaming everything on Israel:

Is it true that you are withdrawing of nationality from the Jordanians of Palestinian origin?

This is a campaign of lies by... external and internal forces meant to tarnish the image of Jordan.

But is it true?

- We need to emphasize the need for the Palestinian land and not to waste the chance to uphold the allowance of "family reunions" carried by the [Israeli] occupation authorities, and that we should be thanked for standing up against Israeli ambitions of unloading of the Palestinian land of its people.

Do you mean that the ones on the Israeli right that propose the idea of «Jordan is Palestine»?

Yes. There are the secret Israeli proposals with undeclared aims to impose a solution to the issue of Palestinian refugees at the expense of Jordan...

But the interviewer is not cowed into accepting this deflection. He goes on to ask specific questions about Jordanian law in disenfranchising Jordanian Palestinians, where the minister stonewalls and insists that there has been no change in policy. One example is about the cases where Jordanians Palestinians who have never been on the West Bank have had their travel documents reduced from 5-year to 2-year renewals:

Some of the [5 year] yellow cards were turned to [2-year] green cards from owners who insist that Jordan is the only home they have ever known.

- We insist on the necessity of renewal of permits for "reunions", as acting otherwise would mean the achievement of the objectives of Israel in the Palestinian territories, drained from their owners. I do not think that any Arab accepts that the Palestinians lose their right to their land voluntarily, because it is contrary to the holding of Palestinian and Arab right of return.

In other words, Palestinian Arabs who happily live in Jordan are not pressuring Israel to create a Palestinian Arab state on the West Bank, and therefore not doing their jobs. He's just helping them do what they are meant to do. Jordan's hatred of Palestinian Arabs is highlighted in this exchange:

Why does Jordan refuse to grant citizenship to children of Jordanian women [and West Bank Palestinian Arab men]?

- We cannot because the current law does not allow it. There is a security and political dimension to this issue, there are 37 Palestinians married to Jordanians, and this means the naturalization of more than 200 Palestinians, and we cannot do it because it serves the goals of the Israelis [as they would live in Jordan], especially at this time.

The minister makes it crystal clear that official Arab policy is to ensure Palestinian Arab statelessness and misery, always in the guise of doing what's best for Palestinian Arabs themselves. (He also says that the PA has no problem with any of this.)

Of course, any other Arab can become a citizen of Jordan and other Arab countries, by law. The laws only exclude Palestinian Arabs.

And they are keeping them stateless for their own good, of course.

Such philanthropy and selflessness exhibited by the generous Arab patrons of the Palestinian Arab cause, willing to spare no effort in ensuring that they remain miserable for decades to come!