Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

So, who are these Americans that visited Gaza?

The name of the American group that visited Gaza over the weekend keeps changing. Now it is the "American Association for International Conciliation," earlier it was the "National Institute for International Reconciliation."

The Hamas UK newspaper, Palestine Info, describes them as "political figures and university professors."

The picture in Palestine Info shows this:

And here is the one in Palestine Today:

Anyone recognize anybody?

"Siege" news

Israel, has allowed construction material into Gaza for the second day in a row.

Yesterday, truckloads of cement and iron bars entered Gaza. Today, more truckloads of unspecified "building materials" are coming in.

The amount of cement that Israel is quietly sending into Gaza in two days is roughly the same amount that the Free Gaza movement is noisily planning to bring into Gaza whenever they manage to get their ships coordinated. The difference is that Israel is coordinating with UNRWA to ensure that the cement is used for real building projects; Free Gaza's is going to go directly towards Hamas weapons bunkers.

Is anyone interested in asking a question on their Facebook wall as to whether, given Hamas being democratically elected, they support Hamas' unlimited import of weapons into Gaza like any other state?

Freedom of assembly, Hamas-style

Al Quds al Arabi reports that the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights was prevented from holding a workshop in Gaza by Hamas.

The topic of the workshop? Rights and freedom in "Palestine!"

Hamas claimed that a meeting like that requires a permit. The NGO countered that, no, according to Palestinian Arab law, it doesn't.

Meanwhile, Hamas also stopped an attempt to hold a protest rally against the destruction of the UNRWA summer camp facilities on Sunday morning.

Sounds like the Free Gaza flotilla of fools will have lots of opportunity to loudly protest against Hamas' crackdown of Gazans' freedom.

(That'll be the day!)

Gaza has too much stuff!

From Financial Times:

...[T]he prices of many smuggled goods have fallen in recent months, thanks to a supply glut that is on striking display across the Strip.

Some argue that Gaza's tunnel economy is becoming a victim of its own success. Hundreds of tunnels have shut down over the past year as the result of greater Egyptian efforts to stop the flow of goods - and weapons - into the Strip. But the remaining tunnels, about 200 to 300 according to most estimates, have become so efficient that shops all over Gaza are bursting with goods.

Branded products such as Coca-Cola, Nescafé, Snickers and Heinz ketchup - long absent as a result of the Israeli blockade - are both cheap and widely available.

However, the tunnel operators have also flooded Gaza with Korean refrigerators, German food mixers and Chinese airconditioning units. Tunnel operators and traders alike complain of a saturated market - and falling prices.

"Everything I demand, I can get," says Abu Amar al-Kahlout, who sells household goods out of a warehouse big enough to accommodate a passenger jet.

h/t Daily Alert

Lebanese "scholarship"

Al Quds has an article about Lebanese professor Kamal Salibi, who claims that the Promised Land in the Bible is really near Yemen.

It turns out that he floated this theory decades ago, and has written a number of books on the subject.

According to Wikipedia,

Kamal Salibi has written three books advocating the controversial "Israel in Arabia" theory. In this view, the placenames of the Hebrew Bible actually allude to places in southwest Arabia; many of them were later reinterpreted to refer to places in Palestine where the Hasmonean kingdom was established by Simon Maccabaeus in the second century BC.

The (literally) central identification of the theory is that the geographical feature referred to as הירדן, the “Jordan”, which is usually taken to refer to the Jordan River, although never actually described as a “river” in the Hebrew text, actually means the great West Arabian Escarpment, the Sarawat Mountains. The area of ancient Israel is then identified with the land on either side of the southern section of the escarpment that is, the southern Hejaz and 'Asir, from Ta’if down to the border with Yemen.

So if the Jordan of the Bible is proved to refer to a river, his entire thesis gets destroyed, right?

Joshua 3:15-17: And when they that bore the ark were come unto the Jordan, and the feet of the priests that bore the ark were dipped in the brink of the water--for the Jordan overfloweth all its banks all the time of harvest-- that the waters which came down from above stood, and rose up in one heap, a great way off from Adam, the city that is beside Zarethan; and those that went down toward the sea of the Arabah, even the Salt Sea, were wholly cut off; and the people passed over right against Jericho. And the priests that bore the ark of the covenant of the LORD stood firm on dry ground in the midst of the Jordan, while all Israel passed over on dry ground, until all the nation were passed clean over the Jordan.

2 Kings 2:2-3: And fifty men of the sons of the prophets went, and stood over against them afar off; and they two stood by the Jordan. And Elijah took his mantle, and wrapped it together, and smote the waters, and they were divided hither and thither, so that they two went over on dry ground.(also see 2 Kings 14-15)

2 Kings 5:10-14, And Elisha sent a messenger unto him, saying: 'Go and wash in the Jordan seven times, and thy flesh shall come back to thee, and thou shalt be clean.' But Naaman was wroth, and went away, and said: 'Behold, I thought: He will surely come out to me, and stand, and call on the name of the LORD his God, and wave his hand over the place, and recover the leper. Are not Amanah and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? may I not wash in them, and be clean?' So he turned, and went away in a rage. And his servants came near, and spoke unto him, and said: 'My father, if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it? how much rather then, when he saith to thee: Wash, and be clean?' Then went he down, and dipped himself seven times in the Jordan, according to the saying of the man of God; and his flesh came back like unto the flesh of a little child, and he was clean.

Also, 2 Kings 6:2-6.

Guess Salibi wasted a few decades of his life. Oh, well.

Nakbapalooza!

Pity the poor Palestinian Arab. They have to fill up weeks of Nakba celebrations with new and innovative ways to demand worldwide pity.

After all, there are only so many victimhood points available, and Palestinian Arabs are competing with those pesky Haitians and Sudanese and others for their fair share.

And Nakba is not just a one-day thing - it is a way of life, where from roughly mid-April through the end of May the PalArabs must come up with gimmicks that will remind the world yet again how terrible things are.

Yesterday brought us one of the more original and mystifying examples of the annual Nakbapalooza pity party. In the center of Ramallah, a city that has been Judenrein for years - a city that is now, for the first time in history, under Palestinian Arab rule - an actress playing a bride, wearing a 50-meter long train on her wedding dress, walked along the streets:

Traffic was stopped on a major Ramallah street for this display.

Then, the other participants in this bizarre ceremony stepped on the dress:

The reason for this is that, if enough people stepped on the dress, it would turn black. This would be a symbol of mourning.

It symbolizes the catastrophe of Palestinian Arabs being treated like dirt for the part 62 years by their fellow Arabs, as their rights have been trampled by the Jordanians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Syrians and every other Arab country.

Oh, sorry, that's not the symbolism here. It's something else altogether. Something to do with Israel, I think. The citizens of the PA - who have an Olympic team, a flag, an UN representative, and more autonomy than most Arabs - are taking their copious amounts of free time to create long wedding dresses that are meant to be stepped on to complain about how poorly they are treated by the Jews.

You can just imagine people in Darfur doing the same thing.

Egyptian/Hamas relations reaches a new low

Today, Hamas interrogated an Egyptian officer who allegedly secretly entered Gaza as a spy.

"Egypt is better off investigating how Israeli agents infiltrated Palestinian and Egyptian territories rather than sending officers in secret to collect information on the Palestinian resistance in Gaza, and torturing Palestinian [detainees in Egypt] into giving up information," [Hamas' interior minister Fathi] Hammad told the newspaper.

Significantly, however, the Hamas official confirmed that relations between Egypt and the Gaza government had been reduced to "unofficial" after the decline in political cooperation, after a week of media speculation on Egypt severing ties with Hamas.

Palestine Today discusses the deterioration of the relationship, quoting an Egyptian newspaper as saying that they are at the lowest level since the short-lived 2005 Cairo agreement between Fatah and Hamas.

Egypt has been freezing Mahmoud al-Zahar out of negotiations over a prisoner swap for Gilad Shalit.

Egypt is also upset that Hamas acted as an independent entity at the recent Arab summit in Tripoli.

Free Gaza - from Hamas

Jameel brings us this nice video:

200 Palestinian Arabs stranded in Kish, Iran

Ma'an Arabic reports about an interesting situation between the Iranian tourist island of Kish and the UAE.

It seems that a couple of hundred Palestinian Arabs, independently, managed to get out of Gaza in search of jobs elsewhere in the Arab world. These people managed to get to the United Arab Emirates on tourist visas, and then to gain employment contracts in the UAE. However, they were not allowed to work on their visas, and were told to leave the UAE and then return as workers.

They couldn't go back to Gaza, and the person interviewed said that he couldn't go back to Egypt where he attended university, so they instead went to the closest country they could - Iran. They checked into some of the hotels in the tourist island of Kish.

Then, when they tried to return to go back to the UAE, the officials there refused to take them in for security reasons.

The Ma'an article says that these security reasons are because they are Palestinian, not because they are coming from Iran (the UAE and Iran have some disputes over other islands in the Gulf.)

Now they can't pay their hotel bills, they don't have food, the Palestinian embassy in the UAE is not helping them, and they have nowhere to go.

UNRWA camp burning: Vandalism or terrorism?

A Fatah spokesman has stated that the burning of the UNRWA summer camp yesterday morning, carried out by dozens of masked armed men, was an act of terrorism.

Osama Qawasmi stated that the evidence shows that the attackers were associated with Hamas - the same people who were supposed to be protecting the area.

The New York Times mentioned yesterday that Hamas has in the past blamed UNRWA for "implementing a plan to spoil the growing generation of Gaza," which mirrors the threats that accompanied the attack.

UNRWA has been careful to describe the attack as "vandalism," not terror.

In a related story, a candy shop in Gaza was blown up yesterday

Flotilla of fools

In January, the Free Gaza website gave the first mention of the flotilla of boats that are now starting on their way towards Gaza.

The ships are trying to bring some 10,000 tons of humanitarian aid to Gaza.

Sounds impressive, right?

Except that only in the past week, Israel has provided 14,069 tons of humanitarian aid to Gaza.

In fact, in the same amount of time that the Free Gaza moonbats and their friends have managed to scrounge their 10,000 tons of cargo, Israel has sent over 230,000 tons of aid to Gaza, not counting the many tens of thousands of tons of fuel. This includes a CT scanner, an elevator, building supplies, glass, clothing and many other products.

Will we be hearing them talking about that? Of course not.

In fact, Free Gaza is against humanitarian aid to Gaza. They've stated this repeatedly, most recently only last November.

They have stated their desire for violent revolt by the Palestinian Arabs. They have shown blatant disregard for Gazan lives. And in their internal communications they don't consider themselves a humanitarian group or an aid organization, but rather a resistance group.

Just something to keep in mind as you read the upcoming media articles and op-eds that refer to this group as "humanitarian."

Qaradawi calls to "cleanse Palestine"

Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the most influential Muslim preachers, just gave a talk at the Olympic Stadium in Nouakchott, Mauritania in front of some 15,000 people.

He criticized the Arab nations for not fighting Zionism sufficiently, calling on them to go back to the basics of the Holy Quran and thereby "liberate" the Al Aqsa Mosque and "cleanse" Palestine.

Qaradawi also recalled his early days with Yasir Arafat, whom he said he got to know while fighting alongside the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1950s. Qaradawi said that Arafat claimed that while in prison, he learned that the Zionists were not afraid of Arab armies but rather of Islam's deity, and the reason was because the Zionists "came to their country to live, but the [Muslims] came there to die."

Qaradawi also called to return to the ideals of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna.

The guy who also inspired Al Qaeda.

So when Qaradawi calls for Muslims to "cleanse" Palestine, what do you think he means?