Time for a truthful Palestinian Arab folksong

Last week, I saw a video (sent out to the Free Gaza mailing list) of an earnest, self-righteous folksinger, singing his heart out about how those evil Zionists have been oppressing innocent Palestinian Arabs, up to and including the Mavi Marmara. If you want to barf, you can see the video here.

The lyrics are filled with what can only be called outright lies, but lies that are accepted as truth by a huge percentage of the world. Here is how it starts:

In 1948 they were driven out at the point of a machine gun
Families fled in fear to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon
They fled around the globe, firmly held in terror's grip
And about a million refugees ended up in the tiny Gaza Strip
In 1967 the IDF moved in
And the refugees in Gaza became refugees again
Settlers took their farmland, soldiers took the ports
And the people were surrounded by military forts

In 2007 they cut it off completely
No access to the borders, no access to the sea
The world began to see this unavoidable stamp
The most crowded place on Earth was now a concentration camp
Israeli jet fighters bombed Gaza from the air
And they kept out the supplies needed to rebuild and repair
They kept out the convoys of humanitarian aid
Anemic children going hungry, crushed and burned in bombing raids

Now, people listening to this in a concert have next to zero ability to think critically about these sincere-sounding libels. They get caught up in the moment - a purely emotional moment that has no bearing on logic or reality - and the hate that underlies these lyrics become, subconsciously, a part of them.

So yesterday I decided that it is time to write a folk song that actually tells the truth about Palestinian Arabs. Unfortunately, I cannot play guitar nor can I sing very well, so I cannot upload it to YouTube and cause countless clueless leftist heads to explode at the confluence of folk singing about an oppressed people and the truth about who is oppressing them.

But maybe one of my readers can.

So, without further ado, here is my song:

The pawns of the Middle East

In 1948 their leaders abandoned them

The rich Arabs packed up and went to Lebanon

Their confident leaders told them to get out of the way

So the Jews could be slaughtered and then they'll be back to stay

But that's not what happened. Their fighters didn't fight.

Wild rumors scared them, and most then joined the flight

They ended up in Egypt, Syria, Jordan

The Palestinian Arabs thought they'd start over again

They thought that they'd be welcomed by the Arabs who said that they loved them

But they were placed in giant camps, and had to stay in tents

They thought that they were all Arabs, but they were only that in name

The other Arabs didn't want them to remind them of their shame

Chorus:

Decade after decade, the Arabs let them down

They treated them like animals, and just used them as pawns

They thought that their problem was that they didn't have a state

But the real problem was that they were taught only to hate.

They wanted jobs, they wanted land, they wanted to fit in

Their hosts only wanted the millions given by the UN

They kept them stuck in camps, in disgusting misery

They did everything possible to ensure they'd never be free.

The Arab states passed laws to let them know where they stand

They couldn't work in certain jobs, couldn't own any land

They had no choice, no rights, no control over their fate

And they raised a generation who was taught nothing but hate.

Chorus

Jordan never gave them an inch of "historic Palestine"

The entire world had no problem. They thought that this was fine.

The only land that Arabs would allow them to receive

Was the land that would be left over when they forced the Jews to leave.

Their new leaders taught terror, for them not to be so meek

Jordan slaughtered thousands of them in a matter of just weeks

And so it went, year after year, kept in dire straits

400,000 of them got kicked out of Kuwait

Decade after decade, the Arabs let them down

They treated them like animals, and just used them as pawns

They thought that their problem was that they didn't have a state

But the real problem was that they were taught only to hate.

It didn't take long  to write - maybe 45 minutes. I could write an entire album in a couple of days. Political folk-singers are overrated.

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Libya proud of violating international humanitarian law

From Ya Libnan:

Seif al-Islam Gadhafi, the son of Libya’s leader said Thursday that part of a deal to free a jailed Israeli photographer involved the release of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

Gadhafi told reporters that the Israeli-Tunisian Rafael Rafram Chaddad was not a spy and accepted his story that he was in the country to photograph heritage sites connected with Libya’s vanished Jewish community.

“This person was naive … he is not a spy and I made use of this issue in favor of our Palestinian brothers in Gaza,” he said. “Palestinian prisoners were released in exchange for releasing the Israeli photographer.”

Gadhafi would not say how many Palestinians were released in exchange for Chaddad, who was freed Sunday after five months in jail.

Once again we quote from the 1979 Hostages Convention:

Any person who seizes or detains and threatens to kill, to injure or to continue to detain another person (hereinafter referred to as the "hostage") in order to compel a third party, namely, a State, an international intergovernmental organization, a natural or juridical person, or a group of persons, to do or abstain from doing any act as an explicit or implicit condition for the release of the hostage commits the offence of taking of hostages ("hostage-taking") within the meaning of this Convention.

Any person who attempts to commit an act of hostage-taking, or participates as an accomplice of anyone who commits or attempts to commit an act of hostage-taking likewise commits an offence for the purposes of this Convention.

Libya has accepted this Convention.

Furthermore, hostage taking is considered a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions (Convention IV, Article 147) in international conflicts. Libya is still in an official state of war with Israel.

Libya has admitted - and is proud of - this grave breach of international law.

Don't expect the UN Human Rights Council to take up this issue. After all, Libya is a member in good standing of that august body.

(h/t Jed)

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The Other Side, part 5

A resident of Shiloh describes how he and his 3 year old son survived a terror attack - and, perhaps more importantly, how he reacted.



The entire series of interviews of so-called "settlers" can be viewed on the project's webpage.

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Will Southern Sudan establish relations with Israel?

In January, Sudan plans to hold a referendum on the secession of Southern Sudan from the country.

A representative of the Southern Sudanese stated in an interview with Asharq Al-Awsat that he saw no reason that the new country should not to establish relations with Israel, saying that other Arab states have done so and that Southern Sudan does not want to antagonize any other country.

It is not clear whether Southern Sudan would be considered an Arab country. Arab states seem to be ambivalent about supporting the secession.

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Media ignores Turkey's use of chemical weapons (updated)

Yesterday, Der Spiegel published a report indicating that Turkey used chemical weapons against Kurdish rebels.

German experts have confirmed the authenticity of photographs that purport to show PKK fighters killed by chemical weapons. The evidence puts increasing pressure on the Turkish government, which has long been suspected of using such weapons against Kurdish rebels. German politicians are demanding an investigation.

It would be difficult to exceed the horror shown in the photos, which feature burned, maimed and scorched body parts. The victims are scarcely even recognizable as human beings. Turkish-Kurdish human rights activists believe the people in the photos are eight members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) underground movement, who are thought to have been killed in September 2009.

In March, the activists gave the photos to a German human rights delegation comprised of Turkey experts, journalists and politicians from the far-left Left Party, as SPIEGEL reported at the end of July. Now Hans Baumann, a German expert on photo forgeries has confirmed the authenticity of the photos, and a forensics report released by the Hamburg University Hospital has backed the initial suspicion, saying that it is highly probable that the eight Kurds died "due to the use of chemical substances."

German politicians and human rights experts are now demanding an investigation into the incident. "The latest findings are so spectacular that the Turkish side urgently needs to explain things," said Claudia Roth, the co-chair of Germany's Green Party. "It is impossible to understand why an autopsy of the PKK fighters was ordered but the results kept under seal."

The Turkish Foreign Ministry has rejected the accusations, according to the Berlin daily newspaper Die Tageszeitung, which reported on the case Thursday. Turkey is a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention, and its armed forces do not possess any biological or chemical weapons, the ministry reportedly said.

The newspaper also reports that it has obtained additional, shocking pictures in the meantime, supposedly autopsy photographs of six other killed Kurds. These images, too, have now been submitted to the Hamburg-based experts.

So far, outside of Armenian, Kurdish and Israeli websites, the rest of the English-language media has ignored the story. It has been a full day since the initial report was published in English and German.

But I guess that if the mainstream media doesn't report it, it cannot be very important. Sorry for wasting your time.

(h/t jarh)

UPDATE: Islamic Jihad mouthpiece Palestine Today mentions the story, saying it is a "smear campaign" by Israel similar to what they did to Saddam Hussein, in order to pressure the world to invade Turkey and to deflect Israel from criticism for the Mavi Marmara.

Those wily Jews, submitting the photos months before the flotilla!

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Gazans forced to stay in their "open air prison" - by their leaders

The idea that Gaza is an "open air prison," which was ridiculous all along, has become farcical ever since Egypt opened the Rafah border in July.

Gazans can freely visit Egypt, as long as they follow Egyptian rules. And those rules include having a valid passport from the PA.

There is only one problem: Hamas refuses to create passports for Fatah members, and the PA is refusing to give out blank passports to Hamas.

Ma'an tells us more about the PA's forcing Gazans to stay in Gaza:

The Palestinian Authority is depriving citizens in Gaza from obtaining passports, a rights group said Thursday.

The Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights wrote to Ramallah-based Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in June urging him to comply with Palestinian Basic Law and issue passports to all citizens without discrimination.

Since June, the center has issued further complaints on behalf of citizens denied passports, none of which have received responses from the PA, a statement said.

The complainants included cancer patient Ahmed Abu Fou'ad, Mohammed Subeh who needs an eye-transplant, and paramedic, Alaa' Sarhan, who needs surgery to remove shrapnel from his body as well as urinary surgery, Al Mezan said.

The Palestinian Human Rights NGOs Council has also written to Fayyad requesting he address these cases, but has not received any response, the report added.

Al Mezan called on the PA, and particularly the Interior Ministry, to respect citizens’ rights, noting that discriminating between citizens on the basis of their political affiliation or opinion constituted “flagrant violations to human rights and to the principle of the rule of law.”

I can't wait for all those "human rights" activists to start rallying in European capitals against this inhumane policy of the PA that forces Gazans to be stuck in Gaza.

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Odds and ends

Some links people have sent me, via email or the comments:

Israel National News (Arutz Sheva) has quoted this blog as a straight news source, and linked back to me. (Even so, they slightly mis-characterize a clan clash as if it was a Hamas activity.) Hey; it's better than being ripped off!

Juan Cole wrote on his blog the interesting "fact" that "despite being Shiite fundamentalists, Hizbullah has consistently supported a strong, united Lebanon and is among the foremost purely Lebanese nationalist forces in the country." Sure - as long as they are in charge. (h/t Dan)

The German Foreign Minister traveled to Saudi Arabia without his boyfriend. Since Saudi Arabia has a death penalty for homosexuality, this might have been a good move. (h/t Silke)

Sky News reports that researchers in Israel have invented an "electronic nose" that can sniff the existence of cancer from people's breath. In fact, the lead researcher is an Israeli Arab. (h/t Jacob)

There is evidence that Turkey used chemical weapons against the PKK Kurdish group. No word on whether there will be a UN inquiry on this war crime, or whether the story will even last a week. (h/t Jacob)

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AFP catches the fake Muslim grave story

I blogged last week about how the Al Aqsa Heritage Foundation, an organization that is pretty much dedicated to lies, claimed that the Jerusalem authorities were destroying ancient Muslim graves - when they were, in fact, fake.

AFP has picked up on the story:

Around 300 Muslim gravestones destroyed by Israeli bulldozers in a Jerusalem cemetery earlier this week were "fake" and set up in a bid to snatch government land, the city charged on Thursday.

The allegation was flatly denied by the Islamic Movement which earlier this week accused the municipality of razing recently renovated Muslim graves in a centuries-old cemetery in a large park in mostly Jewish west Jerusalem.

In its first official response to the claims, the Jerusalem city council on Thursday acknowledged it had removed some 300 tombstones, but said they were not erected over any human remains.
"The municipality and the (Israel Lands) Authority destroyed around 300 dummy gravestones which were set up illegally in Independence Park on public land.

"The court approved the removal of all the dummy gravestones which were laid in the last seven months," the municipality said in a written statement sent to AFP.

"This is a fraudulent set up, one of the biggest in recent years, whose aim is to illegally take over state land."

Underneath the tombstones excavators found only "plastic bottles, cigarette packets and parts of a sprinkler system," the statement said. It accused "Islamic elements" of trying to pull off a huge scam.

It is remarkable, for AFP, to give coverage to the Israeli side first and then have the other side dispute it. Usually you have to wait for paragraph 8 to read the Israeli side of the story, by which time most readers have already moved on to the sports page.

By the way, this is the same cemetery that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem had moved bodies from when building his hotel on top of it, the same cemetery that the same mufti had redirected sewage towards, and the same cemetery that the Supreme Muslim Council had explicitly allowed building an Arab business park on top of.

In other words, Arab lies about this cemetery have a long pedigree.

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Arabs consider the western part of Jerusalem to be "occupied" as well

Many Arab media outlets reflexively put the word "Occupied" in front of "Jerusalem," even if the news story takes place entirely within the part of Jerusalem that was inside those supposedly "internationally recognized borders" before 1967.

Examples:

 The Lebanon Daily Star changed the location of an Reuters story about a new exhibit at the Israel Museum. They also put the words "Holy Land" is scare quotes, which is not in the AFP original.

The Yemen News Agency, Middle East Monitor, and Gulf News follow the same standard.

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Lebanon Daily Star ridicules Nasrallah's "evidence"

From the Daily Star:

Marvel at the contempt Hizbullah’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, must feel for us all, that he would expect us to believe his presentation last Monday telling us that Israel was behind the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister. But that contempt may also in some ways be justified, because far too many Lebanese actually believed him, even as they observe the rapid erosion of their slender sovereignty with lethargy.

Do we Lebanese deserve independence? You have to wonder. Israel has killed many people in Lebanon, and will doubtless kill many more, but we would only be abasing ourselves by abruptly reinterpreting the Hariri assassination in the light that Nasrallah chose to shine on the crime. We would have to believe that Syria did not threaten Hariri in 2004, was untroubled by Resolution 1559, for which it held Hariri partly responsible, did not control Lebanese security in 2005, and did not appoint or approve all senior officials in the security and intelligence agencies. We would have to disregard that these agencies tried to cover up the scene of the assassination, that Hizbullah sought to stifle the emancipation movement by organizing an intimidating demonstration on March 8, 2005, to defend Syria’s presence in Lebanon, and that virtually all of those assassinated after Hariri (not to mention Marwan Hamadeh, who barely escaped assassination before) were critical of Syria.

And, of course, we would have to forget that Hizbullah and its Amal allies twice left the government because it was preparing measures to establish the tribunal – the second time kicking off an 18-month Downtown sit-in to bring down Fouad Siniora’s government.

Nasrallah now offers an explanation for this: the tribunal was politicized. Yet that was not the excuse Hizbullah and Amal used in 2006 when they withdrew their ministers. At the time, their beef was that Siniora and March 14 had undermined governmental procedure by not consulting properly with them. But we can conveniently forget that, too, as well as Syrian President Bashar Assad’s warning issued to the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, at a meeting in Damascus on April 24, 2007. According to a detailed account leaked to the French daily Le Monde, Assad told Ban that approval of the tribunal under Chapter VII authority “might easily cause a conflict that would degenerate into civil war, provoking divisions between Sunnis and Shiites from the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea.”

Perhaps Nasrallah had not yet shared his information about Israel with the Syrian president, who, with amazing prescience, found himself echoing revelations about a Shiite connection in the Hariri assassination more than two years before Der Spiegel made a similar reference – one that Nasrallah now sees as proof of an Israeli plot.

It would take an awful lot of forgetting to buy into Nasrallah’s theory, but that is precisely what the secretary general is demanding. He wants Lebanon, above all its prime minister, to forget the overwhelming evidence from the past and bury the Hariri tribunal for good. Let’s just blame Israel, Nasrallah is telling us, so that we can all live in amnesic harmony.

MEMRI also has a rundown on Lebanese reaction, which predictably follows party lines.

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Iran again met with terrorist leaders yesterday

Not that this is newsworthy any more, but yesterday the Iranian Foreign Minister met with the Damascus-based leadership of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, as well as the leaders of eight other Palestinian Arab terrorist groups.

Even if you subscribe to the loony left characterization of Hamas as a legitimate political leader of Palestinian Arabs, there is no way that you can consider Islamic Jihad and the other groups as anything other than pure terrorist organizations.

The world really doesn't seem to have a major problem with a UN member state openly collaborating with and funding terror groups. Admittedly, next to Iran's nuclear ambitions this is small potatoes, but nevertheless every such meeting needs to be publicized and condemned, over and over again, at all levels of diplomatic channels  - including the UN.

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IDF Chief of Staff: IHH shot first

From the New York Times:

Israel’s top military chief said Wednesday that activists on a Turkish ship were the first to open fire as Israeli naval commandos raided the vessel, part of a six-boat flotilla bound for Gaza, fomenting a bloody confrontation on board that left nine activists dead.

Testifying before an Israeli commission of inquiry, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, the Israeli Army chief of staff, gave the most detailed description yet of the military’s version of the events in late May.

General Ashkenazi said that mistakes had been made. The main one, he said, was that the soldiers, who rappelled onto the ship from a helicopter one by one, lacked the manpower to create a sterile area quickly enough. They were immediately set upon by the activists, some wielding axes, knives, iron bars and clubs, he said.

Though stun grenades were fired first, from the air, they failed to disperse the dozen or so activists on the roof of the boat. What was lacking, according to the army chief, was preparation for the use of “precise fire,” by which he appeared to mean snipers, “to neutralize those preventing the soldiers from boarding the boat.”

The army chief staunchly defended the actions of his soldiers. He said that they had displayed “cool-headedness, courage and morality,” opening fire only when necessary, and that the Israeli use of force was proportionate.

According to the general, the second soldier who fast-roped onto the roof of the boat, the Mavi Marmara, was shot in the abdomen and fired back. Activists who were on board have given very different accounts, saying the soldiers opened fire as soon as they came on board, or even before.

An Israeli military investigation of the episode concluded a month ago that Israeli soldiers most likely fired only after having been fired upon. A video in two separate parts, produced by the army and shown to the commission, stated that the shot fired at the second soldier was “probably” the first shot fired on the ship.

But General Ashkenazi said it was “clear and established” that flotilla participants opened fire first.

The weapon used may have been snatched from the first soldier who landed on the ship.

A gun belonging to one of the soldiers was later found on board, empty of bullets. In addition, the military said it found ammunition, cartridges and bullets that were not from the Israeli Army, suggesting that there might have been at least one other gun on the ship. According to the general, the boat’s captain told the Israelis that it might have been thrown overboard.

General Ashkenazi stated that the army had prepared for the possibility that the activists could open fire, though the military “did not assess correctly the strength of the resistance” the commandos would meet when they came down the rope. According to the video, soldiers trying to approach the Mavi Marmara on rubber lifeboats said they were fired on from both sides of the ship. As clashes broke out on the boat, commandos fired at the feet of their “attackers.”

When the commandos met resistance as they tried to rush the bridge, they responded with fire. And at one point, at least 15 minutes into the struggle for control of the ship, the force commander allowed the soldiers to use accurate and precise live fire against violent activists, to permit more soldiers to climb aboard from the lifeboats.

The stun grenades from the helicopter, which I hadn't heard of before, would explain why the passengers thought that the IDF was shooting at them from the air.

Of course, the "activists" have no problem telling their lies to the world. Here's their graphic of the events, from the Free Gaza page:

Somehow, they must have forgotten to draw their prepared axes, knives, clubs, chains and slingshots. Must have been an oversight.

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