Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Assassination attempt against PRC leader

Unknown assailants detonated an explosive device in the car of Salameh Al-Ghasseen on Wednesday, leader of the Popular Resistance's military wing, the An-Nasser Salah Ad-Din Brigades near Jabalia, northern Gaza.

An explosion was heard in the Ad-Durj neighborhood, near a Jabalia parking lot, according to sources within the de facto police, who added that no injuries were reported.

The An-Nasser Salah Ad-Din Brigades said they condemned the attack against its leader "by a group of outlaws and troublemakers," in a statement.

Not sure who is involved in this, but having terrorist leaders afraid that they will be killed by their own people can only be a good thing.

The PRC Saladin Brigades website prefaces their condemnation of the attack by implying that this was a Zionist plot and that they will cut off the hands of those who try to impede them. Big surprise, there.

Martyr funeral fight!

Palestine Press Agency reports of tensions between Islamic Jihad and Salafist Muslim groups in Gaza.

The Salafist group wanted to take credit for two of the three "martyrs" killed by Israel when they were shooting rockets on Sunday. During the funeral, arranged by Islamic Jihad, the Salafists infiltrated the procession and managed to wrap one of the bodies in their flag before being chased off by the IJ members who re-wrapped the body with their own flag.

Although the Salafists had been at loggerheads with Hamas, particularly during the mosque takeover by their Jund al-Ansar Allah group a few months ago, this is the first sign that they have problems with the Islamic Jihad terrorists as well.

I just want to see video of the terrorists fighting over the dead bodies at the funeral.

Qassam explodes in Gaza, and the launch site was...

Palestine Press Agency reports that an blast in northern Gaza came from a Qassam rocket that exploded before it got off the ground.

The explosion was near the Uthman ibn Affan school.

Just another war crime that will get no attention in the press.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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....

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.

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.

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.