Prisoner statistics fun

A Palestinian Arab organization has released the shocking information that 197 Arab prisoners have died in Israeli prisons since 1967, thus proving Israeli human rights violations against its Arab prisoners.

Terrible!

Until you look at the normal mortality rate for Palestinian Arabs. According to the UN, the normal mortality rate is 3.7 per thousand. if we assume that Israel has imprisoned an average of 5000 Arabs (probably a low number) at any time over the past 42 years, then the number of expected deaths over that time period would be 777.

Ah, but you might object, prisoners are usually young and healthy, and their mortality rates should be much less than the general population!

I don't have the breakdown of mortality rates for Palestinian Arabs by age, so I will use US figures. In recent years the rate for the age group 25-34 has gone between 100 and 140 per 100,000. I'm sure the numbers were worse in the 1970s, but there were more prisoners in the 2000s, so we can safely split the difference and conservatively estimate a mortality rate of 120 per 100,000 for Americans. (The real number for Palestinian Arabs in prison is undoubtedly higher because some prisoners are over 35, and their mortality rate is nearly double the 25-34 age group.)

With those numbers, we would expect 6 deaths a year in a prison population of 5000, or a total of 252 deaths since 1967.

In other words, typical Americans between 25 and 34 have a 27% greater chance of dying in any given year than their Arab counterparts in Israeli prisons!

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One year ago: "Operation Camouflage Hat"

I was looking through my posts last year during Operation Cast Lead and I found an amazing article at Palestine Today that I had forgotten about, that proves that the terrorist strategy was explicitly to place civilians in danger by hiding among them. The Islamic Jihad terrorists interviewed were happy that (they claimed) there were more civilian casualties than fighters.

An email correspondent did a better Arabic translation of part of the article:

There is no visibility of the men of the resistance in the streets of the [Gaza] strip. No one sees their known means of transportation, and even light weapons can no longer be seen with people publicly in the Gaza Strip. The resistance is totally [invisible] even as its actions are felt. Anti-aircraft artillery fires on the aircraft without them knowing their location. The whereabouts of rockets launched from the heart of the Strip cannot be seen or known until they're shot...

The resistance factions initiated a new tactic at the start of the Israeli war on Gaza in the twenty-seventh of last month, to avoid any targeting by Israelis [of our] men.

The residents of the Gaza Strip were surprised with the rockets of the resistance being fired from the heart of the cities of the Gaza Strip, without seeing how the launchers were put up, or their place, in order for deception to prevent exposure to the Israeli intelligence planes of the place of the firing of the rockets...

According to medical sources, the number of martyrs and wounded of the warriors of the Palestinian resistance are few in comparison to the number of civilian martyrs who were killed since the start of the Israeli war on Gaza, except for the large number of Palestinian policemen who were martyred on the first day...

Abu Mohammed, one of the commanders on the ground in the Al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine, said: "What is used by [our men] is called 'camouflage hat' to mislead the Israeli aircraft and collaborators."

Needless to say, Richard Goldstone did not find any evidence that Gaza terrorists purposefully hid among civilians.

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Reports: IDF Goldstone response due in two weeks

According to a Ma'ariv article (cannot find the original, this is from a Palestine Today Arabic report,) Israel plans to release its official response to the Goldstone Report in two weeks.

The response will mention that investigators have not yet uncovered a single example of the IDF deliberately targeting civilians during Operation Cast Lead.

It says that most of the incidents mentioned in the Goldstone Report were based on twisted, distorted facts.

One example concerns the Al Badr flour mill, which Goldstone accused Israel of deliberately targeting with the sole purpose of denying sustenance to Gaza civilians. According to the Israeli response, aerial photos show that the mill had already been destroyed from earlier fighting (I am not sure when.)

Out of the 36 incidents that Goldstone cites, 26 of them were already under internal IDF investigation and they opened new investigations for the additional ten.

UPDATE: Here's the autotranslated Ma'ariv article.

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Today's PalArab news (1/12/10)

Hamas arrested the president of Al Quds University in Gaza today.

A Gaza organization is going to try to imitate the Bil'in style protests in the Gaza buffer zone. They sent some Arab and foreign activists to sit in the zone with Palestinian Arab flags, daring Israel to shoot them. The point is public relations. Israel had recently dropped hundreds of leaflets warning Gazans to stay away from those buffer zones.

A Palestinian Arab sheikh, probably associated with Fatah, issued a fatwa saying that smuggling tunnels are forbidden. The major reason is that they are dangerous, but another reason is that they are used for drug trafficking.

Israel will resume allowing the export of both berries and flowers from Gaza today, after closing the Kerem Shalom crossing n response to mortar attacks there.

Palestine Today received a press release from the "Storm Hawks," a Fatah organization, vowing to attack Israel from Gaza and to not let Hamas stand in their way.

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Work accident!

Ma'an reports:

A Palestinian was killed and three injured in Israeli shelling in northeastern Gaza early Tuesday, medics said.

An Israeli military spokeswoman said forces were not operating in the area of the blast, which came 24 hours after three operatives from Islamic Jihad's military wing were killed in an airstrike in Gaza City.

Meanwhile, a security source told Ma'an that Israel was aware of an explosion near Beit Hanoun, "but as far as we can tell, it was an internal blast."

So who do we believe, the impartial medics or the evil Zionist enemy?

For the tiebreaker, look at Hamas' Al Qassam brigades website, where it mourns a person autotranslated as "Thaer Qassam vegetables" (I believe his real name is Thaer Kader) who died "while performing a task of Jihad" in northern Gaza. Palestine Press Agency says that one of the injured is clinically dead. Firas Press also says that it was an internal explosion.

It seems that the "medics" are as reliable as other Palestinian Arab "witnesses" to fictional Israeli crimes.

And the new year is starting off with a bang!

UPDATE: The badly injured terrorist has died as well. Send out the candies!

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Arab League doesn't favor Fatah over Hamas

Ma'an shows this as a breaking story, so there are no details yet:

Arab League `doesn`t favor` any Palestinian faction over another

Someone should tell the Western nations....

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Most West bank Arabs don't think they have freedom of expression

According to the latest Near East Consulting poll, 57% of West Bank Arabs feel that they do not have complete freedom of expression.

In Gaza, the number is not much higher, at 63%.

But if we throw a few billion more dollars a the "moderate" PA, I'm sure that there numbers will improve. Because Western money has such a good track record at moderating Arabs.

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70% of poor, impoverished Gazans have Internet access

According to the latest Near East Consulting poll, over 70% of Gazans have Internet access - a higher percentage than people in the West Bank!

Only 8.4% of Gazans use Internet cafes, though. Which is probably a good idea, since those cafes have a habit of blowing up.

At any rate, I wonder how the Gazan rate of Internet access compares with those in the "poorest parts of Africa." You know, the places that Jimmy Carter says have better nutrition than Gazans.

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30% of Arabs in the territories want to emigrate

The latest published Near East Consulting poll shows that some 30% of Palestinian Arabs would like to emigrate from their homes.

34% of Gazans, and 26% of West Bank Arabs would like to move away.

Of course, no Arab country wants them, and their leaders don't want them to leave.

So when the PLO says that "What is important is that individual refugees decide for themselves which option they prefer – a decision must not be imposed upon them," it really means that "you guys must continue to be used as pawns until we destroy Israel completely, just as we have used you for the past 61 years."

It's all in the interpretation.

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Islamic Jihad laughs over cost of Iron Dome

The Islamic Jihad-aligned Palestine Today site has an article that contrasts the cost to Israel of deploying Iron Dome to protect its citizens from attack, against the cost of Qassam rockets.

As they note, a Gaza rocket costs only between $100 (for a mortar) and $1000 (for a Grad,) while each Iron Dome interceptor rocket costs between $30,000-$40,000.

They seem amazed that Israel would care so much to defend its citizens from wanton attacks of rockets.

I'm sure that "human rights" organizations will find something to criticize about Iron Dome as soon as it is deployed. Maybe they will argue that Israel should spend its money instead to provide more aid to Gazans. Or that since Gazans have the "human right" of "resistance" that Israel doesn't have the right to stop it.

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HRW's Roth tries to weasel out of his libel

I wrote last week about HRW's Ken Roth's article vilifying Israel as a nation that uniquely hates human rights and that goes out of its way to trample the rights of its enemies.

One of the things he wrote was a purposeful misinterpretation of a statement by Tzipi Livni, which he used as justification for his sick thesis. He falsely wrote that she said that the IDF should not distinguish between Gaza civilians and terrorists, when in fact she said that Israel should not distinguish between Arab and Jewish victims of terror.

NGO Monitor traced the history of how Livni was misquoted and found that it originated in a similar accusation by Al Haq, a European-funded Palestinian Arab NGO. That libel then spread to other Palestinian NGOs, to Al Jazeera and finally to HRW which quoted it in its Rockets from Gaza report last August - in a transparent attempt to balance its rare criticism of Hamas with a calumny against Israel. The entire episode shows in a clear light how HRW's fact-finding methodology is flawed and biased, when they cannot even be bothered to read the original source of the quote and instead rely on biased and false interpretations from Palestinian Arab NGOs with a clear agenda against truth.

Now, Roth is backtracking. His article has been edited to take out Livni's quote, and to add a correction that, unbelievably, still doesn't admit the error:

On January 7, 2010, Human Rights Watch has updated this article following suggestions that the quote of former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni ("On my way here I heard that Hamas declared the man killed by a rocket in Ashkelon ‘one of the Zionists' despite being an Israeli Arab. They don't make a distinction, and neither should we.") is ambiguous on whether she meant that Israel will not distinguish between combatants and civilians. Other statements from Livni and former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert support the argument, and one from Olmert has been added here.

The quote was not ambiguous at all, but as we have seen in the pasdt, HRW - that bastion of uncovering the truth - will do whatever is necessary to paper over its own mistakes.

And what was the quote that they added from Olmert that they say proves Israel's intentions to wantonly kill civilians? It is added in parentheses:

As Ehud Olmert, prime minister during the war, reportedly said in January 2008 about the Gaza blockade, Israel would not create a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, but "[t]here is no justification for demanding we allow residents of Gaza to live normal lives while shells and rockets are fired from their streets and courtyards at Sderot and other communities in the south."

Olmert repeated the notion after the war, reportedly telling his cabinet that, "The government's position was from the outset that if there is shooting at the residents of the south, there will be a harsh Israeli response that will be disproportionate."

The fact that Olmert said that the response will be disproportionate does not in the slightest way imply that Israel intended to target civilians.

So the only quote they are left with is Olmert's quote that the residents of Gaza will not "live normal lives" - during a blockade.

As with the Livni quote, HRW is falsely juxtaposing the quotes together to imply something that was not said. The first quote was about the blockade, the second one was about the war.

Is HRW now saying that Israel, under the Geneva Conventions, is obligated to provide Gaza residents with cement and pipes and potassium nitrate that can be used for rockets against Israeli civilians, so as not to inconvenience them? Because that sure seems to be HRW's standard by quoting Olmert the way they did.

Even if Olmert had said his statement about the war, is that the new standard for HRW's interpretation of the Geneva Conventions they pretend to uphold - that wars should not affect the lives of the people who live in a war zone?

As usual, HRW raises the bar in its misinterpretation of Geneva to create circumstances where it is literally impossible for a nation to defend itself, especially against an enemy that purposefully and deliberately hides amongst civilians.

This is the tragedy of Human Rights Watch. Their admirable intention to protect civilians has turned into a twisted parody of reality, where wars are by definition inherently evil and where the human rights of the citizens of democracies are less important than others', where democratic nations are held to standards that are literally impossible to uphold, where the parts of the Geneva Conventions that justify circumstances of attacking civilian areas are constricted by the willful misinterpretation of the zealous and biased as to become invisible.

And HRW's leaders are willing to lie to accomplish their agenda.

(h/t t34zakat)

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Egypt bans all Gaza aid convoys

From Daily News Egypt:

Aid convoys bound for the Gaza Strip will now be banned from traveling across Egypt after activists this week clashed with police, the foreign minister said in remarks published on Saturday.

Ahmed Aboul Gheit told government newspaper Al-Ahram that members of one convoy led by British MP George Galloway committed “criminal” acts on Egyptian soil on their way to the blockaded Palestinian coastal enclave.

“Egypt will no longer allow convoys, regardless of their origin or who is organising them, from crossing its territory,” Aboul Gheit said.

“Members of the (Viva Palestina) convoy committed hostile acts, even criminal ones, on Egyptian territory,” the foreign minister added without elaborating.

On Tuesday night activists with the Viva Palestina convoy clashed with police in Egyptian the port town of El-Arish, 45 kilometers from the Gaza border.

Seven protesters were arrested during Tuesday’s clashes, but police swapped them for four policemen held by the activists.

A prosecutor in El-Arish later issued warrants for the arrest of seven activists, including two Britons and an American woman.

I have yet to see any comment from the Viva Palestina folks, the Free Gaza movement or Code Pink on this development.

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