Monday, October 05, 2009
Elder of Ziyon
Sunday, October 04, 2009Elder of ZiyonThis story might be true - there are unfortunately some Israeli Jewish women with incredibly low self-esteem who would go for such an arrangement.Abou-Sebaa, who sells used clothes and electrical appliances, says everyone likes his Jewish wife, Lenor, who is also his business partner.
Marriage is complicated enough with just one wife so add to the mix a second and things get even more complicated; but what if one wife is Jewish and the other an Arab, for one Palestinian man this rare marital arrangement is nothing but bliss.
Forty-year-old, Sami Abou-Sebaa says despite the obvious political and religious differences he and his two wives and their children all live in the same house with no problems.
The couple own two cars, one with a Palestinian license plate and the other with an Israeli license plate.
“We use the Israeli one to go to Israel and bring the goods we need for our trade,” Lenor told Al Arabiya.
Although Lenor lives peacefully with her husband's Arab wife, she still faces problems with the Palestinian community around her.
“Many are afraid of talking to me although and I am the type that prefers dealing informally with people,” she said.
But in all seriousness both Abou-Sebaa and Leonor insist they will never allow their children to join the Israeli army.
“In the future, my children will throw stones at the Israeli occupation forces. Blood ties and the bond with the land are stronger than anything else,” Abou-Sebaa said.
Sunday, October 04, 2009Elder of Ziyon
The Daily Telegraph reports:So now idiots will start saying that Ahmadinejad cannot possibly be an anti-semite....A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish roots.
A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver.
The short note scrawled on the card suggests his family changed its name to Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after his birth.[Photo from Al Arabiya - EoZ]
The Sabourjians traditionally hail from Aradan, Mr Ahmadinejad's birthplace, and the name derives from "weaver of the Sabour", the name for the Jewish Tallit shawl in Persia. The name is even on the list of reserved names for Iranian Jews compiled by Iran's Ministry of the Interior.
Experts last night suggested Mr Ahmadinejad's track record for hate-filled attacks on Jews could be an overcompensation to hide his past.
Ali Nourizadeh, of the Centre for Arab and Iranian Studies, said: "This aspect of Mr Ahmadinejad's background explains a lot about him.
"Every family that converts into a different religion takes a new identity by condemning their old faith.
"By making anti-Israeli statements he is trying to shed any suspicions about his Jewish connections. He feels vulnerable in a radical Shia society."
A London-based expert on Iranian Jewry said that "jian" ending to the name specifically showed the family had been practising Jews.
"He has changed his name for religious reasons, or at least his parents had," said the Iranian-born Jew living in London. "Sabourjian is well known Jewish name in Iran."
During this year's presidential debate on television he was goaded to admit that his name had changed but he ignored the jibe.
However Mehdi Khazali, an internet blogger, who called for an investigation of Mr Ahmadinejad's roots was arrested this summer.
Sunday, October 04, 2009Elder of ZiyonAlso check out this piece by Soccer Dad.There are at least a dozen reports that I'm aware of that have been prepared about events in Gaza at the beginning of this year, and yet, of all the reports, it's this report, the Goldstone Report, that has generated the strongest response amongst the Israeli public, amongst the Israeli leadership and amongst supporters of Israel. And I think if we ask ourselves why that is, there are three main reasons.
The first one is the narrative that lies at the heart of this report. This is a report which says that Israel's operation in Gaza had nothing to do with 12,000 Hamas missiles on Sderot, it had nothing to do with self-defense, it had nothing to do with the smuggling of weaponry under the Egypt-Gaza border into Gaza. In fact, in the 500-plus pages of the report, there is not a single mention of the right of self-defense or the smuggling of weapons. It is a report that says that Israel's operation in Gaza was a deliberate disproportionate massive attack directed against civilians. And that is something that no one who knows Israel can really countenance.
This morning I read an article by the head of Betzelem who was saying that this is a conclusion which is simply not supported by the evidence in the Goldstone Report. And it's true; in order to come to this conclusion the report really does have to play fast and loose with the evidence. First, there's a tremendous amount of selectivity in choosing the incidents that it actually investigates. So, for example, the report admits that there have been allegations that Hamas placed its headquarters or one of its headquarters in the bases of the Shifa Hospital, but we can't address these because that wasn't one of the incidents that we chose to investigate. Or we can't confirm or deny allegations that Hamas used mosques for terrorist activity, because they only investigated one case that had to do with a mosque and found no evidence in that particular case. In fact, in parentheses I say "in that particular case, according to Palestinian websites," five of the people that were killed were actually terrorist activists, members of the Al-Qassam Brigades.
They play fast and loose with their sources, relying on almost every conceivable source that supports evidence against Israel and rejecting almost any evidence that is supportive of Israel or is detrimental to Hamas. And sometimes actually the same source is regarded as being reliable as far as its accusations against Israel is concerned but regarded as being unreliable when it points to, for example, Israel's humanitarian efforts or Hamas abuse of civilians, and so on.
And we have prepared an initial response to the report, some 20 pages, which highlights some of the most obvious legal and factual errors: There's reliance on Israeli laws that have been off the books for years; there's misquotations of United Nations Security Council Resolutions, and so on.
The reason that this narrative is so troubling is that it really leaves no room for genuine debate about how to engage in a conflict of this nature. You know, we generally don't think and the military doesn't think that we have all the right answers. But we are, by and large, asking the right questions. And asking ourselves whether an attack or an operation could have been more humane, more effective, is a genuine debate that we need to engage in with the international community as well. But with a body that says that your fundamental goal was to cause massive punishment on the civilian population, there is no room for any debate of that nature.
So that's the first reason. The second reason why I think this report has generated such a strong response is that it represents a full frontal attack on the Israeli legal system. And this is something that should worry not just Israel but also most Western and democratic countries that have very, very similar systems for actually investigating and checking their conduct in the course of military operations.
Israel, as I'm sure you know, has a multi-layered system for investigating allegations of wrongdoing; that consists of field investigations, criminal investigations, supervision by the Military Advocate General, upon that, supervision of our Supreme Court, and so on. In this particular case, in additional to all of those systems, following the operation, five large-scale command investigations were opened into general questions of principle arising in the conflict, things like incidents in which there was injury caused to medical facilities, caused to UN facilities when there are large numbers of civilians casualties, and so on.
In the course of those five command investigations, there were 30 specific incidents that came under investigation, and they're currently on the desk of the Military Advocate General who has to decide whether to open criminal investigations. And because of the sensitivity, the Attorney General has said that he will also review the decision of the Military Advocate General.
In addition to those command investigations and the specific investigations that came out of them, there are an additional 70 to 80 specific investigations that were opened up as a result of complaints received by human rights organizations, like Betzelem and Addala, direct complaints by individuals to the Military Advocate General or to the Attorney General.
Out of all of those complaints so far, 23 criminal investigations have already been opened and are in various stages. From the information that I received this morning, at least 11 of them have already proceeded to the stage of taking evidence from the Palestinian complainants and the others are at various stages.
Correlating those with the 36 incidents that the Goldstone Report chose to investigate, 12 of the incidents in the Goldstone Report are at various stages, either already of criminal investigations or investigations that may lead to criminal investigations.I should mention that 12 of the incidents that are referred to out of the 36 incidents in the Goldstone Report were not known to the Israeli authorities until the publication of the report. Those are mainly dealing with damage to property and so on. And that means that no complaint had been received by the Israeli authorities. They were raised for the first time in the Goldstone Report, and those have been referred to the authorities for examination and investigation at the moment.
I'll just finish the legal aspect by saying that obviously all of the decisions along the way, whether it's the decision of the Military Advocate General or the Attorney General whether to open criminal proceedings or not open criminal proceedings, are all subject to review by our Supreme Court, which, as you know, can be petitioned for judicial review by Israelis, Palestinians, human rights organizations.
So, really, the dismissive attitude of the report for this entire system is very, very troubling, very troubling for Israel, very troubling for other countries that have similar systems, and troubling for other countries that often rely on the jurisprudence of our Supreme Court. I actually just received through my e-mail today, a decision of a Canadian Court, a Superior Court in Montreal, which last week relied on the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court. And so the attack on the legitimacy of this report is troubling from a legal point of view.
And, finally, I think the third reason why it's such a troubling report is its recommendations. Its recommendations, I think, are unprecedented, both in terms of their scope and in terms of their one-sidedness. There is an attempt in the recommendations of this report to harness not just the Human Rights Council but the Security Council, the General Assembly, the International Criminal Court, the domestic legal systems of almost every country – every country in the world, in fact – as part of a political campaign against Israel, and in a really blatantly one-sided manner.
We're talking about a recommendation that there be a moratorium on the use of certain weapons by Israel, but no restriction on the use of weapons by Hamas. We're talking about the establishment of an escrow fund it's called, a fund for supporting victims, but the victims are all Palestinians, and the only party required to pay into this fund, of course, is Israel. We're talking about the use of what's called universal jurisdiction, putting Israelis on trial abroad. But it's clear from the report the intention is only to put Israelis on trial abroad and not to put any other violators of human rights and so on. So, very, very damaging, very one-sided, very non-credible recommendations.
So I think those are the three main reasons why there's been such a strong response to the report. And I'll just finish with one final personal comment as a legal advisor within the government, within the system. And I think the role of any legal advisor, governmental or military legal advisor, is to be two-faced. Maybe all lawyers are two-faced, but by "two-faced" I mean spending part of our time being advocates of governmental policies to the world, but also turning round and doing the other half of our job, which is to be advocates of compliance of international law within the system, to our political leaders and to the military.
And a report of this nature, a report which pretends to represent international law but really perverts international law, really undermines the advocates of international law within the system because it really says that there is no lawful response to the charges of terrorism. And that's simply not true. It's not a workable proposition, and ultimately it's going to undermine respect for international law both in our region and probably elsewhere across the world. Thank you.
Sunday, October 04, 2009Elder of ZiyonEleven Jordanians were charged on Wednesday with trafficking human organs and selling them illegally in Egypt, police said.
"Three other suspects are being interrogated, while seven more people are still on the run. We have been following on the issue with the Egyptian authorities for several months," he said.
The suspects, who were extradited from Egypt on Monday, are part of a group preying on poor people in the kingdom, a police spokesman told AFP.
In some cases, people were paid to donate organs while still alive, while in others organs were being removed from people who had died and sold on the black market, the official said.
"The group sold rich Arabs kidneys for up to $30,000 each. If convicted, they face 10 years in prison with hard labor," the source added.
In 2007, Jordan created a National Commission to Promote Organ Donation in a drive to crack down on illegal trafficking and also to encourage Jordanians to donate their organs after death.
That came after authorities uncovered more than 80 cases of trafficking that year.
Organ trafficking is banned in the kingdom, with jail penalties and up to 20,000 dinars ($28,000) in fines. –AFP
Friday, October 02, 2009Elder of Ziyon
Goldstone Report--Do you think there is any merit to Goldstone’s findings? If so, where do you think he got things right?
The entire process was flawed, from the time of the formation of the Commission up through the release of the report. Although I do believe that Goldstone consciously tried to extend the mandate in order to look at both sides of the story, and I do not ascribe any maliciousness to him, the framework of the Commission was faulty from the start. This is the central problem. The very framing of the report adheres to the Palestinian narrative - just looking at the table of contents, we see that he chooses to start the "military operations" section with the "blockade," not with the rocket fire that preceded it by years. Similarly, he chooses December 27th - the day Israel attacked - as the start of "military operations" and ignores Hamas' declaration of war three days beforehand altogether. It could have been framed that Israel was counterattacking, but that does not fit the narrative that Goldstone adheres to.
These are just two examples of how the framework one chooses will inevitably color the results. In these two cases, Israel is assumed to be the aggressor and the initiator. The framework does not allow any other viewpoints to be seriously considered, as they are basic assumptions from which the rest of the report flows. There are other dimensions to the flawed framework he uses, for example he chose to highlight specific heart-wrenching stories to illustrate alleged Israeli war crimes rather than look at the full context of the operation (or to mention equally heart-wrenching stories from Sderot.)
--Having looked at the report thoroughly, if you had to boil down the main methodological errors that led to his findings being lopsided what would they be?
Besides the reliance on suspect "eyewitnesses," I would say that it is his inability to imagine or believe alternate Israeli explanations for various events. The report consistently shows more skepticism for Israel's viewpoint than for the viewpoints of the Palestinian side. It is difficult to accept "even-handedness" between a democracy that has every interest in (and history of) investigating and correcting its mistakes and an organization that has every interest in twisting facts for its own gain. It is even more problematic to see how Hamas statements are treated as more reliable than Israel's. (See here.)
--Other people I’ve spoken to point to the report’s reliance on Palestinian eyewitness testimony as its central problem? Do you agree? If so, why? Is there something inherently untrustworthy about Palestinian witnesses?
At the risk of breaking rules of political correctness, the answer has to be (in general) "yes." There is a script that Palestinian Arabs are conditioned to use, and when they speak to the press for the record they almost always adhere to it. I have a number of examples here, and in context of the Gaza operation the most telling are this story from an embedded YNet reporter and this story where an anonymous farmer tells another reporter that, yes, there were actually rockets from the area that every "eyewitness" claimed had none.
--Is there any way Goldstone could have carried out his reporting differently? What steps could he have avoided to keep him from ending up with the conclusions he reached?
One can argue as to whether Israel should have cooperated with Goldstone (I think they were correct in not doing so) but Goldstone penalized Israel for its non-cooperation. If he was after the truth, he should not weight the testimony of Palestinian civilians higher than Israeli claims; on the contrary, he should have worked extra to see Israel's perspective despite its official non-cooperation. He simply did not give Israel the benefit of the doubt, while he was rarely skeptical about Palestinian Arab claims.
Friday, October 02, 2009Elder of Ziyonself-death
Friday, October 02, 2009Elder of ZiyonSuccess of the peace process requires a halt to settlement construction including in East Jerusalem, Secretary General of the Palestinian President’s Office At-Tayeb Abed Ar-Rahman said on behalf of President Mahmoud Abbas Thursday.Just because the Fatah-dominated PA has added a precondition to talks that it never had with previous Israeli governments doesn't mean that it is inflexible or incapable of compromise. Why, it is bending over backwards in another set of negotiations - with Hamas terrorists:
While Abbas was earlier reported to have caved to American demands that he drop the “precondition” that Israeli settlement construction must be stopped as a gesture toward the seriousness of the new government before he would sit for talks, a demand by the Fatah party that negotiations not continue until settlements stop seems to have re-activated the demand.
Member of Fatah central committee Jamal Muheisen revealed an agreement amidst his party Thursday to accept holding legislative elections based on 80% proportionate and 20% constituent, and noted Hamas had confirmed its acceptance a 70/30 split. “This means we are not only 10% off from each other now,” he said.Who can doubt that the PA wants peace when they are so willing to unify with a terrorist organization?
Muheisen added in an interview with Palestine Radio the decision was in the interests of reaching a unity agreement. He noted disagreement on the pass percentage remains, but that Egypt is currently working on a plan to resolve the difference. Fatah requested parties get at least 2% of the vote before they gain a seat in the Palestinian Legislative Council, while Hamas wants at least three.
Friday, October 02, 2009Elder of ZiyonNaturally, I had to painstakingly plow through hundreds of photographs of her to properly illustrate this important story for this blog. Lucky for me, I hit the jackpot here.As opposed to other models and actresses her age, Private Esti Ginzburg had no hesitations at all about serving in the Israel Defense Forces. In fact, Ginzburg believes in military service so much, that as part of her role at the IDF reception base she explains to young recruits why it is so important to join the army.
"In order to contribute and help, in order to be part of the State," Ginzburg said, "enlisting is a duty, not a choice. There are a million of things I don't feel like doing, but I do them because I have to. Military service is part of the things I believe in, the values I was raised on."
Thursday, October 01, 2009Elder of ZiyonGoldstone Report311. The military operations of 28 December to 19 January 2009 and their impact cannot be fully evaluated without taking account of the context and the prevailing living conditions at the time they began. In material respects, the military hostilities were a culmination of the long process of economic and political isolation imposed on the Gaza Strip by Israel, which is generally described as a blockade.Why exactly does Goldstone choose the blockade as the beginning point of the narrative? It would be at least as valid to choose the beginning of the Qassam rocket fire on Israelis several years beforehand, or perhaps the violent Hamas coup against the PA, or perhaps the rocket fire that came after Israel's disengagement from Gaza, or any of a number of other seminal events each of which helped shape the circumstances of the fighting.
Israel controls the border crossings (including to a significant degree the Rafah crossing to Egypt, under the terms of the Agreement on Movement and Access 163) and decides what and who gets in or out of the Gaza Strip.However, the link he provides to this Agreement shows no such thing.
The tunnels built under the Gaza-Egypt border have become a lifeline for the Gaza economy and the people. Increasing amounts of fuel (benzine and diesel) come through those tunnels as well as consumables.Yet he doesn't mention other major imports through the tunnels - explosives, rockets and weapons. Egypt has confiscated many tons of weapons before they reached Rafah. Goldstone elsewhere mentions that some of Hamas arsenal are "thought to be smuggled" and "allegedly smuggled" without saying exactly how (para. 1621 and 1622.)
Thursday, October 01, 2009Elder of ZiyonGoldstone ReportIn one incident highly relevant to the cases investigated by the Mission because of factual similarities, a soldier recounted an event he witnessed.(448) A family is ordered to leave their house. For reasons that remain unclear, probably a misunderstanding, the mother and two children turn left instead of right after having walked between 100 and 200 metres from their house. They thereby cross a “red line” established by the Israeli unit (of whose existence the mother and children could have no knowledge). An Israeli marksman on the roof of the house they had just left opens fire on the woman and her two children, killing them. As the soldier speaking at the Rabin Academy’s “Fighters’ Talk” a month later observes, “from our perspective, he [the marksman] did his job according to the orders he was given”.Footnote 448 notes " Testimony of 'Ram' in the Rabin Academy Fighters’ Talk, pp. 6-7. The Mission notes that “Ram” clearly states that he was an eyewitness to the incident."
From Ma'ariv (translated by CAMERA):"All of the soldiers who were involved in the conference were questioned - not as a punishment - but in order to understand whether they had witnessed these things. From all of the testimonies we collected, we can safely conclude that the soldiers who made the claims did not witness the events they describe," the source said.
"All of it was based on rumors. In the incident of the alleged shooting of the mother and her children, what really happened was that a marksman fired a warning shot to let them know that they were entering a no-entry zone. The shot was not even fired in their general direction," the source said.
"The marksman's commander ran up the stairs of a Palestinian home, got up on the roof, and asked the marksman why he shot at the civilians. The marksman said he did not fire on the civilians. But the soldiers on the first floor of that house heard the commander's question being shouted. And from that point, the rumor began to spread," the source added.
"We can say with absolute certainty that the marksman did not fire on the woman and her children. Later, the company commander spoke with the marksman and his commander. We know with certainty that this incident never took place," he said.
Two central incidents that came up in the testimony, which Danny Zamir, the head of the Rabin pre-military academy presented to Chief of Staff Gaby Ashkenazi, focus on one infantry brigade. The brigade’s commander today will present to Brigadier General Eyal Eisenberg, commander of the Gaza division, the findings of his personal investigation about the matter which he undertook in the last few days, and after approval, he will present his findings to the head of the Southern Command, Major General Yoav Gallant.The New York Times also followed up and mentioned that the investigation found this incident to be "an urban myth."
Regarding the incident in which it was claimed that a sniper fired at a Palestinian woman and her two daughters, the brigade commander’s investigation cites the sniper: “I saw the woman and her daughters and I shot warning shots. The section commander came up to the roof and shouted at me, 'Why did you shoot at them?’ I explained that I did not shoot at them, but I fired warning shots.”
Officers from the brigade surmise that fighters that stayed in the bottom floor of the Palestinian house thought that he hit them, and from here the rumor that a sniper killed a mother and her two daughters spread.
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