Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Evil extremist Zionists to visit torched mosque

Dozens of rabbis and activists from the Religious Zionist camp will visit Sunday the West Bank Palestinian village of Yasuf to protest against the torching of the village's main mosque and to send a message of reconciliation to the Muslim population, Ynet has learned.

During their visit, they will lend a hand in the clean-up and refurbishing efforts at the mosque. They will also donate a number of Korans in place of those that were burned in the fire.

Rabbi Yehuda Gilad, who heads the yeshiva on the religious kibbutz Maale Gilboa, initiated the event together with Rabbi Avia Rosen from Ein Hanatziv and Rabbi Shmuel Reiner. Rabbi Gilad said, "We came to expel darkness, especially during the days of Hannukah. Light is not added by hurting our brothers, the Muslims, who are the servants of God just as we are. This is an important message to relay."

According to Rabbi Gilad, rabbis from across the spectrum of Religious Zionism and from areas throughout Israel are expected to partake in the event that was put together just Sunday morning. "This is not a political protest, but a humanitarian, moral, and religious issue. We have seen and heard condemnations (of the mosque arson) from both ends of the political spectrum," said Rabbi Gilad.

These are the very types of Jews who are almost invariably portrayed in the world media as "extremist," "ultra-religious," "and "fanatics." They are vilified as venomously hating Muslims and Arabs. They are the ones who are either settlers themselves or support the settler movement wholeheartedly.

JPost adds:

Dani Dayan, who heads the Council of Jewish Communities of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, condemned the attack as "outrageous" and "morally wrong."

I have yet to see, ever, a single Palestinian Arab leader publicly call any of thousands of terror attacks on Jews in Israel to be "morally wrong." Their English-language condemnations are invariably leavened with the explanation that the attacks are bad for their cause, but never that they are immoral.

So far I have counted 340 stories in Google News that have mentioned the attack. It will be instructive to see how many will bother mentioning this extraordinary protest.

I predict that it will be significantly fewer, or a wire service that mentions it will spin it so as to make the arsonists look like the mainstream and the outraged leaders the tiny minority.

The main reason is that this story directly contradicts the "extremist settler" meme that that the mass media has relied upon to "explain" the conflict to ignorant Westerners. Reporters will usually choose to ignore a story rather than report on facts that contradict their lazy shorthand that they pretend represents a higher truth.

Comparing two attacks of holy places

In the past couple of days there has been quite a number of news stories about the arson done at a mosque in Yasuf on the West Bank, apparently by Jewish settlers. The act has been rightfully denounced by settler leaders, by the Israeli government, by the opposition, and by the UN.

I am reminded of a similar vandalizing of a holy place that whose damage I witnessed and photographed the last time I was in Israel, at the burial place of Shmuel Hanavi near Jerusalem.

The Aron HaKodesh (ark) was pried open, the Torah was stolen, the place was ransacked and there was much damage to furniture, the walls and many holy books. The worshipers there described it to me as a "pogrom."

The incident barely rated a tiny mention in Arutz-7 and was ignored by the major Israeli papers. There were no condemnations by Arab politicians, by the EU, by the UN, or even - tragically - by Israeli leaders.

Is it that these sorts of incidents are so widespread that they fail to even make the news, or that Jews are not nearly as concerned about their own honor as they are about the honor of Muslims?

Why don't we hear about the Egyptian blockade of Gaza?

Despite denials, it appears that Egypt is building a huge iron wall on its borders with Gaza that will go deep underground specifically to stop smuggling tunnels.

Notice how the Independent newspaper describes the situation:

Leaders of Hamas, the Islamist movement that rules the Gaza Strip, are believed to have been greatly dismayed by Egypt's willingness to implement the project while the Israeli blockade continues and while Egypt keeps its own crossing with the Strip closed.

Israel blockades, but Egypt merely closes crossings.

Reuters even goes further:

The Israeli daily Haaretz reported Egypt was installing an underground metal wall about 20 to 30 metres (70-100 feet) deep along the short border strip where Palestinians have dug a warren of tunnels to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

You see that Reuters says that the Rafah tunnels between Egypt and Gaza are meant to break the Israeli blockade.

To be fair, in a little noticed story from almost one year ago, Reuters UK did manage to write a story that talks about Egypt's blockade. According to its archives, however, it has used the phrase "Israeli blockade" 449 times and "Israel's blockade" an additional 220 times. In contrast, Reuters has used the phrase "Egyptian blockade" 20 times, and each time it said either "Israeli-Egyptian blockade" or similar, as it did in the article linked to above. That makes it even-handed! (h/t HB)

(AP' s Sarah al-Deeb, surprisingly, is a bit better, saying "Egypt has been harshly criticized by Arab and Muslim groups for cooperating with Israel in blockading the 1.4 million residents of the impoverished Gaza Strip for more than two years.")

In other blockade news, Israel allowed an export of flowers from Gaza yesterday, the first such export in months.

(h/t an emailer)

Do pacifists sing "Ma'oz Tzur"?

The Ma'oz Tzur song, universally sung after lighting the Chanukah candles every night, is hardly compatible with today's leftist conventional wisdom as to how Jews should act and what we should pray for.

The translated lyrics of the first stanza are:

O mighty stronghold of my salvation,
to praise You is a delight.
Restore my House of Prayer
and there we will bring a thanksgiving offering.
When You will have prepared the slaughter
for the blaspheming foe,
Then I shall complete with a song of hymn
the dedication of the Altar.

It is a pretty explicit call for God to destroy Israel's enemies and then go on to build the Temple. These ideas are mainstream Jewish concepts but hardly similar to Western thinking of the past few decades. Too violent, too controversial, too supremacist to actually want to ask God to help you win a war and to ascribe holiness to a mere place.

I wonder if the Tikkun and J-Street supporters have changed the lyrics.

The Hamas "Ministry of Women's Affairs" has denounced the planned Miss Palestine competition, scheduled to be held December 26 in Ramallah.

The ministry called the competition an indication of "moral collapse" and it demanded that the Ramallah government, which supports the contest, to "stop this farce that harms the reputation of our pure and honorable history."

The Islamist Hizb ut-Tahrir party in Gaza also condemned the contest:

The Islamic party said that “the honor of Muslim women is not for trade or pleasure”, and accused the Palestinian Authority of being shameless and of aiming at spreading corruption and obscenity among the Palestinian people.

The party also said that such festivals were created by “corrupt western cultures that treat the women as products to be hold and bought”, and added that Palestinian women are mothers of sisters of courageous fighters and martyrs.

The party added that the Palestinian Authority should not sponsor foreign activities that reflect western traditions that are unacceptable to the Palestinian people. It also considered the contest as an attempt to bury the values of Islam.

It demanded the P.A to cancel the contest without any delays and to stop “spreading immoral principles among the Palestinian people”.

It is always illuminating to hear what Hamas and other Islamist parties consider "immoral."

The joys of being spontaneous

Actually, I am not a very spontaneous person, but it struck me today that right now is the best time for me to visit Israel, and that if I don't go now I won't have an opportunity to go for a couple of years.

So, I'm leaving on Sunday, for ten days!

To Arabs, the Green Line is a green light - into Israel

An interesting catch by MEMRI:

The Syrian daily Teshreen attacked the EU's decision on Jerusalem, stating that the city is the eternal capital of Palestine and that it must not be divided, and that its division constitutes a step towards harming the right of return and other rights.

I guess the Green Line is only sacred in one direction...

"Civilians" a hit in French

The French Philosemitism blog has taken my video and my team's research and put together a nice illustrated article on "civilians" in Gaza, a post that has been reproduced on other French sites and which is causing a bit of a bump in my pageviews.

The lesson is that people are more interested in videos than in text, and if I want to cause a splash I need to find the time to make more videos. (Roger Simon recently pointed to another one of mine, about how crowded Gaza is, and then Michael J. Totten picked up on it.)

All I want for Chanukah is six extra hours every day....

Goldstone report inaccuracies part 24

Martin Kramer noticed a bizarre statistic in the Goldstone Report:

I've been reading through the part of the Goldstone Report treating the economic impact of Operation Cast Lead—a part that hasn't gotten much attention. It's largely a crib of a March 2009 report compiled by the Palestinian Federation of Industries, whose deputy general-secretary, Amr Hamad, was interviewed three separate times by the mission. The mission deemed both the report and Hamad's testimony to be "reliable and credible."

The most important sentence in this section of the Goldstone Report is this one: "Mr. Amr Hamad indicated that 324 factories had been destroyed during the Israeli military operations at a cost of 40,000 jobs" (paragraph 1009). I did a double-take when I read that: 40,000 would be astonishing in an economy like Gaza's. This is what Hamad said in his testimony (June 28, Goldstone in the chair):
The industrial sector that was destroyed, for example, the 324 factories that were destroyed, that we[re] destroyed used to employ four-hundred thous-, uh, 40,000 workers. And these have lost their uh, jobs, uh, forever.
So that's the source of the number. But if you return to the report of the Palestinian Federation of Industries, it puts the job losses at these 324 factories not at 40,000, but at 4,000. That's an order-of-magnitude misrepresentation by Hamad of his own organization's findings. The Goldstone Mission should have wondered at the figure, checked Hamad's testimony against the Palestinian Federation of Industries report, detected the discrepancy, and gotten it right. But it didn't. Perhaps the mission members, hearing the word "factories," thought that 40,000 jobs sounded credible. In fact, more than a quarter (88) of these 324 "factories" employed five people or less, and over half (189) employed from five to twenty people (Federation report, p. 12). The vast majority of these "factories" should really be described as "workshops." Only three employed a hundred or more people.

In fact, that is not the only misrepresentation that Amr Hamad made of his own organization's report. He told Goldstone that 324 factories were "destroyed" but his report says that 324 were "damaged," and 56% of them were "totally damaged." So the number of destroyed "factories"/workshops was closer to 181, not 324.

Again, Goldstone could have easily checked the facts, and decided not to.

Quick link

Charles Ettinson notes a wrongheaded initiative by the Israeli Finance Minister to ban importing Arabic books from enemy Arab states like Syria and Lebanon.

Opposing this bill seems nothing less than discriminatory and unjustified. Here is a large, linguistic and ethnic minority who want books in their own language. Provisions exist to ensure that hate materials don't make it into the country, what's the problem? ...

Books are vehicles for culture, for knowledge and for understanding. Preventing their import because they come from the wrong side of a line, punishes a minority who should be allowed to read in their first language, but also means that the culture (including Jewish-Israeli culture) and exchange that could normally have taken place in a mutually beneficial way, is being held up.

In addition to the reasons he states, it is wrong simply because Israel wouldn't want these same states to ban Israeli items, even though they do.

(I will not use this post, criticizing an Israeli minister, to claim that I am now "even-handed" :-)

Gaza swine flu spreads

Another 15 cases of swine flu have been announced in Gaza, with one more death.

Israel has announced that it will send an additional 30-40,000 vaccines to Gaza.

Despite the panic, Hamas is still hell-bent to have a huge rally to commemorate its anniversary, a move being strongly criticized. (Other organizations have cancelled their own events because of the flu.)

Tony Judt's insanity

Tony Judt again finds a venue for his longstanding view that Israel should be destroyed and replaced with a "bi-national state," this time in the Financial Times. He uses Shlomo Sand's book that attempts to deny the existence of a Jewish nation as a springboard.

Judt has argued the same things before Sand's book, and it is curious why such a stupid idea is still respected enough to be published. His similar 2003 essay in the New York Review of Books gets into more detail about how such a state would work - it would require an international police force to stop Arabs from killing Jews! ("The security of Jews and Arabs alike would need to be guaranteed by international force.") Yeah, a state that requires outside help to police its own citizens is really viable! His idea is apparently to return to the good old days in the 1930s when the British were forced to deal with an Arab intifada and "intrafada" that killed hundreds of Arabs as well as many Jews - and British as well.

Critiques of the 2003 article can be seen here, and the comments section of FT has plenty of other interesting criticisms, pointing out that Judt seems to hate only one particular type of nationalism enough to want to eradicate it even though his arguments would pretty much demolish every nation state if applied equally.

The Sand connection is tenuous. I'm not going to go into the details of Sand's sensationalistic and bizarre book here (a good critique can be seen here, and my main question to him would be whether the phrase " מי כעמך ישראל גוי אחד בארץ " predates the nineteenth century) but Judt doesn't even use Sand effectively to help his argument, saying that somehow if all the Jews of Israel weren't exiled in the first century CE ... Israel shouldn't have been created. There are a lot of unwritten assumptions in that ellipsis.

Briefly, Sand points out that many, or most, Jews did not leave Israel immediately after the Roman conquest. This is well known. After all, the Jerusalem Talmud was written inside the borders of the Land of Israel centuries after the destruction of the Temple. Judt bizarrely seems to be claiming that if the Jews weren't forcibly expelled, then they have no right to want to return. He might want to glance at the lyrics to Hatikvah to gain a more sophisticated, nuanced and accurate view of the point of Jewish nationalism:

Our hope will not be lost,
The hope of two thousand years,
To be a free nation in our land,
The land of Zion and Jerusalem.

The operative word is חופשי, free.

(The reference to Jerusalem must really drive him crazy.)

There's plenty more to criticize with Judt, but one more point to ponder: if Jewish nationalism, an unbroken idea that spans millennia, is a myth, how real is Palestinian Arab nationalism?